Timothy C. Winegard. For King and Kanata:
Canadian Indians and the First World WarALICIA
ROBINET

99

Contributor Biographies

{vii}

FROM THE EDITOR

Indigenous Performance 2

To highlight a common interest shared across the essays
published in SAIL 25.1 (Spring 2013), I designated
the issue
"Indigenous Performance." For SAIL 26.4, I return
to that
designation to highlight once again what is clearly becoming a
central focus in Native American literary scholarship: how
individuals, communities, nations, and texts of all kinds do not
passively represent Indigenous identities but actively perform
versions of indigeneity that respond to the particular needs,
desires, and circumstances of both audiences and performers.
As in the earlier issue, the essays brought together here explore
a wide range of Indigenous performance strategies engaged for
an equally wide range of rhetorical and political purposes; as
important, they demonstrate those strategies operating across a
wide range of specific contexts.
The issue begins with the script for a performed essay that
includes stage directions and cues for sound and projected
images. Actor, director, and theater scholar Michael Greyeyes
first performed the piece in 2013 before an international
audience of scholars, practitioners, and activists gathered in
London for a symposium on indigeneity, performance, and
globalization. In his narrative of personal growth and formal
education, Greyeyes relates his experience as a Native actor
asked to play iconic Native characters created by non-Native
writers, especially his portrayal, early in his stage career, of
Chief Bromden in the play adaptation of the popular novel One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Greyeyes demonstrates how his
dramatic embodiment of Bromden and his necessary
exploration of Bromden's mental illness and confinement to a
mental institution contributed to his own growing critique of
the institution of the settler academy and, specifically, the
colonial politics of its curriculum and canon.
The articles that follow continue this exploration of the
critical {viii} effects of analyzing, embodying, and
performing--or choosing not to perform--Native roles desired
or assigned by settler culture. Peter Bayers investigates how
Luther Standing Bear constructs a viable contemporary Lakota
masculinity in his 1928 autobiography My People the Sioux by
creating an idealized model of "traditional" manhood in his
portrayal of his Lakota father, a model that appeals to the
desires of non-Native audiences but is nonetheless useful for
himself and, potentially, other Native men. It is this idealized
model, Bayers argues, based in Standing Bear's early childhood
experiences of his father before being sent away to boarding
school, that enable him to survive his experiences of
assimilative settler institutions and the imposed ideals of
non-Native masculinity. Next, Colleen G. Eils takes up David
Treuer's 2006 work of metafiction The Translation of Dr.
Apelles in order to explore Treuer's critique of the assigned role
of the Native translator as a transparent conduit of "authentic"
Native culture. Rather than provide the desired reading
experience of unmarked authenticity, Treuer invites readers
into a nuanced performance of dissimulation, one in which they
must actively participate. By subtly and strategically displacing
non-Native stereotypes, Eils argues, Treuer disrupts the
idealization of Native identities for non-Native consumption
through a politics and a performance of sophisticated literary aesthetics.
Finally, Drew Lopenzina brings the issue full circle with a
critical review of the April 2014 reenactment of the wedding of
Pocahontas and John Rolfe, believed to have occurred at
Jamestown, Virginia, in April 1614, on the four hundredth
anniversary of that (supposed) event. Rather than write from
the perspective of a performer, Lopenzina writes from the
complementary perspectives of a member of the witnessing
congregation-audience that attended the reenactment and a
scholar of US colonial literature and history. He is thus
positioned to situate the highly charged, contemporary
performance of Pocahontas's assent to non-Native
marriage--and all that she and that marriage have come to stand
for in settler culture--within their multiple historical, consumer,
and media contexts. In doing so, Lopenzina reveals the
multiple ironies of the ongoing idealization of Pocahontas in
US settler culture and the ongoing suppression of the reality of
settler violence in both the past and present. Like other
performances of Indigenous identity within the context of
settler celebration, this version of an embodied Pocahontas
evokes not only her fascinating presence but also her inevitable
absence.

Chadwick Allen

{1}

Inside the
Machine
Indigeneity, Subversion, and the Academy

MICHAEL
GREYEYES

This performative keynote address was originally performed on October
25,
2013, at Royal Holloway College/University of Notre Dame, London, UK, as
part of the conference "In the Balance: Indigeneity, Performance,
Globalization" organized by Helen Gilbert.

[The title of the keynote address projects
onto a screen behind a standard
academic podium. A tall actor, an Indigenous man, walks up to the podium,
regarding the audience politely. He speaks into a microphone.]

I once played Bromden.

Chief Bromden.

Created by Ken Kesey in his 1962 novel One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest and subsequently made into a play by Dale
Wasserman, and then famously transformed into a film
directed by Miloš Forman.

[A production still of Will Sampson, from
the 1975 film, appears on the screen
behind the actor.]

The image of this man, Will Sampson, is iconic. His portrayal
of Chief Bromden in the film is legendary.

Interestingly, the work is known for the epic battle between the
protagonist, R. P. McMurphy, and Nurse Ratched, but both the
play and the book that inspired it featured Chief Bromden as
the narrator. It is Bromden's point of view that frames the entire
journey of the men in the State Hospital and provides us with
the portrait of McMurphy.

What is noteworthy here is that Bromden is crazy.

{2}

[There is a shift in the actor. Confusion
clouds his eyes; he speaks in a huskier
voice, clearly terrified.]

Papa? They're foggin' it in again.
Somethin' bad is gonna
happen, so they're foggin' it in.

[The audience hears the sounds of
machinery, grinding and metallic.]

There! You hear it,
Papa? The Black Machine. They got
it goin' eighteen stories down below the ground. They're
puttin' people in one end and out comes what they want.
The way they do it, Papa, each night they tip the world on
its side and everybody loose goes rattlin' to the bottom.
Then they hook 'em by the heels, and they hang 'em up
and cut 'em open. Only by that time they got no innards,
just some beat up gears and things. And all they bleed is
rust. You think I'm ravin' 'cause it sounds too awful to be
true, but my God, there's such a lot of things that's true
even if they never really happen! (Wasserman 8)

[The image of Sampson fades. The actor
continues as himself.]

When I saw the film as a young boy, I was drawn to Bromden.
The only Indigenous character in the movie, the only brown
face visible. Much like the situation I found myself in growing
up in a white suburb of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in western
Canada. Of course, my family was connected to our
communities to the north and west of the city, in Battleford,
Muskeg Lake, Prince Albert, Poundmaker, and Sweetgrass, but
I found myself--like Bromden--surrounded by that which was
not me.

[Sing-song.]

"One of these things is not like the other?"

Part of my early identity was framed by difference. This is a
trope that I would return to again and again.

But in a weird twist, my journey brought me from
Saskatchewan through the worlds of classical ballet, through
Hollywood, and then for nearly eight years to northwestern
Ohio. Middle America. And Kent State University, where I
pursued my graduate degree.

The Theatre Department at Kent State ran Porthouse Theatre, a
professional theater company that performed each summer at
the Blossom Music {3} Center in the Cuyahoga Valley.
In
2002 I was cast as Bromden--the six-and-a-half-foot Indian
giant--in their remount of the Wasserman play.

Not simply because I look like the character. But, for a long
time now, I've been inside the machine, too.

[As Bromden, but somewhat
matter-of-factly, almost detached.]

There's a shipment of frozen parts come in downstairs--hearts
and kidneys and brains and the like. I can hear them rumble
into cold storage down the coal chute. A guy sitting in the room
someplace I can't see is talking about a guy up on Disturbed
killing himself. Old Rawler. Cut both his nuts off and bled to
death, sitting right on the can in the latrine, half a dozen people
in there with him didn't know it till he fell off it to the floor,
dead.What makes people so impatient is what I can't figure; all
the guy had to do was wait. (Kesey 102- 03)

[An urgent whisper!]

You're inside the machine, too! But you just might not know it.

[The actor continues.]

Kesey's novel distorts the traditional storytelling omniscient.
We are conditioned to trust our narrators. They've been through
it, we reason. They wouldn't lie to us. But at least we know
they're sane. Bromden isn't. His mind is full of hard, cruel
images. The novel suggests where those images come
from--his time in the army, from boarding school . . . [beat]
from Maitland Street . . .

My school was an old Quaker church in the middle of
downtown Toronto, 105 Maitland Street, near the area known
as Cabbagetown. The National Ballet School--one of the
world's finest training centers for classical ballet.

{4}

[An image of Canada's National Ballet
School appears behind the actor. We
see the wide interior of what was known as Studio A and B. Light wooden
floors, the rich wood of the original church, beautifully preserved, with
sunlight streaming through the room's many windows.]

It was here they taught me to speak. En quoi. Devant. En
arriere. Pizhalsta. "Lengthen your spine!" I learned their
grammar and the aesthetics embedded in it: Symmetry.
Refinement.

[Beat.]

Conformity.

I like to say that my cultural identity--my Indigenous one--was
unimportant to them. It didn't matter that I was brown. I wasn't
singled out. [With a sly smile.] They didn't like any of us! And
the technique was light years beyond the capacities of our
young bodies. It was an unscalable mountain that we pitted
ourselves against daily. Week after week. Month after month.
Year after year.

In such a crucible, we were either forged with stainless steel
spines and calloused feet, or we got melted down and shipped
home.

[The image of the ballet school
fades.]

Due entirely to the support of my family, I was successful. I
graduated from the school in 1984 and danced with the
National Ballet of Canada, then with the company of Eliot Feld
in New York City. I danced on the great stages of the world:
the Met, the National Arts Centre, the Royal Opera House. But
outside the window of my profession, my chosen institution,
another path beckoned.

[An image of the actor, as the character Tecumseh, from the PBS
documentary
film Tecumseh's Vision, part of the landmark mini-series We Shall
Remain.]

I believe that I was always an actor.

When I was a student at the ballet school, I'd tell people that I
was not an actual dancer, but an actor involved in an eight-year
performance art piece, in which I played a dancer.

I injured my leg, quite severely, in 1990 and had to take a year
off from dancing. I stepped off the treadmill, got down out of
my hamster-wheel.

It's dangerous to give someone time to think.

{5}
It's inevitable, really, that one begins asking questions. That's
why they got us runnin'. That's why they extended the
broadcast window for television. I remember when, in my
country, the television channels--both of them--would go off
the air at midnight. Grainy images of Mounties, the national
anthem, the color bars.

The world quieted. The fog cleared. They don't have to worry
about that now.

The televisions never turn off. I email and get emailed in the
middle of the night. We never sleep.

[The image of the actor as Tecumseh fades.
Then, again, he speaks in
Bromden's voice.]

I remember one Christmas, Papa . . .
here at the hospital.
It was right at midnight and there's a big wind and the
door blows open whoosh! And here comes a fat man all
dressed in red with a big white beard and moustache. "Ho
ho ho," he says, "like to stay but I must be hurryin' along,
very tight schedule you know." Well, the Aides jumped
him and pinned him down with their flashlights and gave
him a tranquilizer and sent him right on up to Disturbed.
They kept him six years, Papa, and when they let him go
he was clean-shaved and skinny as a pole. (Wasserman
36)

[The actor takes a moment to return to the
space, to reflect on those words.]

Playing Bromden was very powerful for me. I understood his
silences. I didn't have to pretend that I was filling big shoes.
Bromden believes he is a smaller, paler version of his father. I
was performing in Sampson's shadow. I got that smallness for
nothing. But it was a focusing event for me. I've always played
Indians. I don't think I've ever been cast as anything else. I went
back to university as a thirty-year-old actor to widen my craft
and to engage with roles for which I would never reasonably be
considered, given the issues of diversity in Hollywood. I went
back for the classics: Shakespeare, Ibsen, Williams, among
others. I didn't really know what I was getting into.

Ad so, unbelievably, I paid to go back inside the Machine.

But my experience there was surprising. Extraordinary. Great
professors: Rosemarie Bank, Terry Burgler, Yuko Kurahshi. I
went to get a {6} practitioner's degree, but it was the
studies
areas that caught me in their currents. Postcolonial theory,
postmodernism. Derrida. Baudrillard. Foucault. Shohat. Stam.

My thesis was titled "Re-inventing the Indian: Subversive
Performance in Film and Theatre." Playing Bromden was a key
part of my research. And I found myself caught between
opposing forces: history, representation, cultural authenticity,
and authentic performance--forces working against a naive
approach to the role. In one scene the stage direction has
Bromden drinking heavily during a party. I've been careful
about denying to a predominantly white audience the image of
myself, a brown man with long black hair, drinking heavily.
Acting drunk.

Mmm. What to do? What to do?

In the end, I played the part as I felt he needed to be played.
And my Bromden, in that scene, was the life of the party. Huge
and bold and unafraid of what anyone would see or think.

He was free . . .

I was free.

And that peculiar journey took me back home to Canada, to
York University. After I defended my thesis, I sent applications
to twenty different schools. Only two responded [which I know
is pretty fair in that job market], with York University in
Toronto putting me on a short list. I drove up from Ohio to
interview and taught a demo class.

Then the offer came: assistant professor, tenure track. Like
many junior faculty, I literally had no idea what I was doing
those first few years. I was the youngest person on the faculty.
And I was the only brown face in my department. In the grand
tradition of academe, I was saddled with one committee after
the other, particularly the onerous ones that senior faculty had
already cut their teeth on, years before. I was back on the
wheel, runnin' hard.

Midway through my tenure process, the world economy melted
down, and a new breed of administrators moved into power at
York and other institutions, at least they did so in Canada. They
looked at the books scrupulously and asked why we were
running in the red by several hundred thousand dollars per
year.

{7}
Studio classes are expensive, they argued.

Small classes are a selling point, we countered! Our
undergraduate reviews reflect this!

I have come to understand our short history in this way:
Sometime in the 1950s or '60s, practicing artists convinced the
powers-that-be that fine arts can and should be taught at the
university level.

And they got their open-toed sandals in the door.

And to be frank, it was great, and everyone came out ahead.

Fine arts practice and the methodologies used to teach it were
approved by the Senates, and there was a tremendous demand
for arts education. And universities were the better for it,
especially when you could have serious-looking students
holding cellos or standing at a ballet barre with their legs in
developpé on the front covers of their brochures!

I mean, the Arts are great, just so long as the sons and
daughters of the elites don't end up actually doing it [in
disbelief] for a living! But then in the middle of the recession,
when the endowments began to run thin, the bean counters
realized it was and always will be a money-losing proposition.
It was time to kick the hippies out. They had a glorious run.

Whatever it was went
haywire in the mechanism, they've
just about got it fixed again. The clean, calculated arcade
movement is coming back; six-thirty out of bed, seven
into the mess hall, eight the puzzles come out for the
Chronics and the cards for the Acutes . . . in the Nurses'
Station I can see the white hands of the Big Nurse float
over the controls. (Kesey 140)

And so I joined with my colleagues in defending our programs,
and the intentions of those programs, and their unspoken
biases. Self-preservation was part of it certainly, but I honestly
believed that our training, the basis of our curriculum, was
worth saving. Then I was asked to teach a course on
intercultural theater.

[The image of the white bars of light
fades.]

{8}
I believe I was a natural fit for the part.

I had worked extensively with Native Earth Performing Arts, a
major Indigenous theater company in the city. As well, most of
the artists that we would study were my friends and peers,
many of whom I had already worked with, or they had worked
with my friends and collaborators. My bona fides for teaching
such a course were exemplary. And for my students, having
me, an Aboriginal man, at the front of the room, talking about
colonialism, identity, the colonial gaze, and interculturalism
gave my presentation of the material a clear urgency--an
authenticity, if you will.

This raises an interesting point . . . I'll call it a flaw in the
Machine. By asking me to teach something, I had to learn it
well enough to impart it to others. . . . And it politicized me
radically. [With eyebrow raised.] It appears someone was
asleep at the controls. Because this is what I began teaching
them . . .

I borrowed from a brilliant reader titled Theatre and
Interculturalism, written by my friend and colleague Ric
Knowles. One afternoon, the students walked into the lecture
hall to find these words projected on the screen:

Whiteness Studies 101
Department of Caucasian Anthropology

[Assuming the guise of an all-too earnest
"Caucasian Anthropologist"--not a
white anthropologist, but rather an anthropologist who studies Caucasians.]

Good afternoon! Welcome to Whiteness Studies 101. My name
is Michael Greyeyes. I'm an Associate Professor here in the
Department of Caucasian Anthropology. My research includes
Cultural Whiteness and White Dance Forms through History.
I'm also a published author. Some of you may be familiar with
my most recent publication: What It Means to Be White.

Now I'm sure you've noticed that I, myself [placing a hand
upon his chest], am not white. But please be assured that I have
a great deal of expertise in this area. Not only do I have an ma
and a PhD in Whiteness Studies, but my field work in this area
is extensive. I have lived with White people my entire life. I
have lived in their communities, worked alongside them.
They've shared their sto-{9}ries, their mythologies.
Opened
their homes to me, initiated me into theirs rituals, their
ceremonies.

But this course examines far more than just this. We shall
journey to the very heart of Whiteness.

We shall ask: What is the unquestioned cultural frame?

Today's lecture will cover The Culture of Whiteness, as well as
Whiteness as a Frame of Mind . . .

But let's begin with . . .

Significant Historical Events and Achievements of the White
People.

Starting with Architecture. Their influence on world
architecture is unquestioned.

[The lecturer changes slides, looking toward
the screen behind him at the
Greek Parthenon against an impossibly blue sky.]

And where would we be, where would this venerable
institution be, without this invention?

[An early lithograph of two men standing at
a printing press, with the caption:
The Gutenberg Galaxy Now Appears.]

White people initiated several cataclysmic social and economic
movements . . .

[A bleak charcoal drawing of a factory, with
smoke spewing from the
building's many stacks. A bridge in the foreground spans a river, undoubtedly
polluted and toxic, flowing before the factory. The caption reads: The
Industrial Revolution, 18th and 19th Centuries.]

As well as an array of ingenious devices . . .

[A drawing of a "Penny Farthing," an early
bicycle, with a gigantic front
wheel and small rear wheel.]

White people were intrinsically involved in various political
movements, including, for example, The French Revolution!

[He changes the slide, now showing Liberty
Leading the People by Eugène
Delacroix, 1830.]

{10}

White culture has always celebrated the unique contributions of
individuals, but it is when individuals come together, forming
collectives and communities, that their achievements truly
become remarkable.

This device [a 1950s tabletop radio flashes onto the screen]
emerged from the work of many individual inventors, as did . .
.

[We see a slide of the Hoover Dam, still
under construction, with the caption
Depression-Era Construction.]

And . . .

[We see a bright color advertisement for
The Snuggie: a White woman lounges
on her couch in a garishly red, fuzzy gown, reading a book, a tremendous
smile on her face. An "As Seen on TV" sticker is emblazoned at the corner of
the advert.]

[As the laughter of the audience subsides,
the lecturer continues.]

In the first part of the semester, we'll explore the rich and
varied history of White People, their culture, population,
society, law, and art.

[The next slide appears showing an oil
painting of a Viking ship with rows of
oars extending from its sides. A large caption above it reads Emigration. The
lecturer regards the image.]

White people have an extensive history of emigration and
settlement. There are White people on literally every continent
in the world!

This is a picture of a typical White male.

[An aged silver-print image of a white man,
circa late nineteenth century, with
slicked hair, parted in the middle, and a huge, bushy handlebar mustache.]

Dance.

[An Edward Degas painting of two white
ballerinas at the barre, replete with
Romantic era tutus and satin pointe shoes.]

Music.

[An oil painting of J. S. Bach with a
starched white wig, holding a piece of
paper with bars upon bars of musical notation. We hear the strains of Baroque
music.]

{11}

Aahhh. Marvelous. This music is so wonderfully complex.
Beneath its driving and insistent rhythm lies a veritable
symphony of musical lines, startling counterpoint, and
invention.

[The music fades.]

But White people are not simply craftsmen and artists; they
also enjoy a physical lifestyle in both organized sports and
leisure activities.

[A sepia-toned photograph of four dashing
white men from the 1920s, with
knickers, cardigans, crisp white shirts, and ties. Reminding us of the "lifestyle"
advertising from Hollister and Abercrombie & Fitch.]

An example of their domestic life.

[Another color lithograph of a typical
American family from the 1950s. A tall,
blonde wife, a dark-haired husband in a suit jacket, with V-neck sweater and
tie, three young boys with horizontal-striped shirts, and a young blonde girl in
a pink dress, with white socks and black Mary Jane style shoes, in their
kitchen, with an open fridge, packed with food. They're all laughing. A small
terrier-style dog appears to be barking merrily.]

[Beat.]

Of course, I would be remiss if I did not mention that not ALL
the activities of White people contributed to the greater good.

[A stark, black-and-white image of Adolf
Hitler riding in a car, saluting a
seemingly endless column of his troops. The lecturer takes a moment to allow
the unsettling and suddenly somber mood to lift.]

Here is a typical White wedding.

[An image of the Royal Wedding of Prince
William and Princess Kate, he in
full regalia, she in a stunning gown, sitting in an open, horse-drawn carriage,
beaming. Men on horseback can be seen riding alongside the carriage, their
costuming equally resplendent. A big caption on the photo reads: White
People.]

[A new slide appears with the title:
Deconstruction. The "Caucasian" lecturer
is now put aside.]

[The actor takes the audience through an
unpacking of what they just
witnessed, discussing:

{12}Topsy-Turvy: a reversal of a typical lecture on "ethnography," during
which
you became vividly aware of the lecturer's identity and point of view;

The cultural frame was no longer "unquestioned," no longer
hidden; it was, in
fact, under scrutiny;

[The final slide fades from the screen. The
actor continues as Bromden.]

The glass came apart like
water splashing, and the nurse
threw her hands to her ears. He got one of the cartons of
cigarettes with his name on it and took out a pack, then
put it back and turned to where the Big Nurse was sitting
like a chalk statue and very {13} tenderly went to
brushing the slivers of glass off her head and shoulders.

"I'm sure sorry, ma'am," he said. "Gawd but I am. That
window glass was so spick and span I com-pletely forgot
it was there." It took just a couple of seconds. He turned
and left her sitting there with her face shifting and jerking
and walked back to the day room to his chair, lighting up
a cigarette.

The ringing that was in my head had stopped. (Kesey
155)

The budget woes have not lessened at my institution; they've
only gotten worse. But now my perspective has shifted,
realigned itself. If this thing has to go down, then perhaps it's
time. It is, after all, 2013. Much has changed since these
departments opened for business, and the rate of change today
is very swift.

But while everyone else in my department was seemingly
focused on the lack of funds, the hiring freeze, and other
budgetary responses, I was looking at what we were teaching.

I brought my concerns to my colleagues, beginning with the
"Origins Project." This project was created to address the fact
that our department had very little diversity in the
curriculum--all Western, all white, all the time. "Origins" asked
the participants to study a particular world culture, specifically
its origins mythology, and to use it as a starting point for a
collectively devised work. I had always thought the work that
was produced was weak, in some cases embarrassingly so--but
I had no vested interest in challenging it. After all, we
produce--using Peter Brook's definition--a lot of "deadly"
theater in the Academy. But everything had changed for me,
and in one meeting I just said it aloud: "It's racist. We can't let
it continue in any way."

The R-word.

Stunned silence is the best way I can describe the response. I
felt obliged to continue, "We might as well call it the Colonial
Project." One of my colleagues ventured, with a frown, "How
so? I don't understand." Well, I answered, it's completely in
line with the larger colonial movement, in which the West
"mines" world cultures for their ideas, symbols, stories, natural
resources, and even people for the West's economic, political
and cultural benefit.

{14}
Gulp.

It got axed.

But I couldn't stop there. I began conversations about play
choices, faculty hiring, and lack of diversity in the classrooms,
in the hallways, in our department meetings--with anyone who
would listen. Why was our department so white, in an
institution that is so amazingly diverse?

It was interesting to see where my colleagues began aligning
themselves. A few surprises certainly, but sides were created
when I started to question canonicity. You see, when
Whiteness is marked and its neutrality challenged, when the
Emperor is told what's up, the limits of tolerance become quite
evident, quite quickly.

[Shocked.]

That guy is asking us to retool the factory! I've built my whole
career on the use of this particular wrench. I mean, honestly, it
seems late in the game to suggest such wholesale changes.
Babies, bathwater, and all!

I teach movement to the actors in our conservatory. I teach
Viewpoints improvisation, the vocal and physical technique of
Tadashi Suzuki, the dance technique of Jose Limón, and until
quite recently classical ballet. In a very recent meeting I
announced I'd no longer be teaching it to the actors--ballet in a
five-week module has always been a joke, even though I'm
probably the best ballet teacher the department will ever have.
It is also the most easily identifiable part of the Eurocentric
canon and training platform upon which our department is
founded.

And the interconnectedness of such a curriculum is pervasive.
When I announced I'd no longer teach ballet, my colleagues
questioned that choice, as ballet was a very good way to
formalize our twenty-first-century-students' bodies for their
work investigating Restoration drama, for example. It's one pin
connected to the next, one bolt holding up the strut on which
five other things are built. Pull that one pin, that one connector,
and the whole thing is imperiled.

[Beat.]

Exactly.

{15} I don't understand why we are still doing
Restoration
drama at all. That's personal preference, admittedly, but if
Restoration drama should go the way of melodrama and
Gregorian chanting, I won't need to gather with friends to toast
its demise. It's why I left the National Ballet of Canada so many
years ago. I understand intellectually the "enduring" power of
the classics, but standing in a wig, with buckles on my
high-heeled shoes and lace hanging in festoons from the cuffs
of my shirt, didn't seem to make all the years of grueling labor
seem so necessary, seem relevant.

In fact, I've only just realized that I'm fracking my own
department. I didn't intend for this to be the case. I wasn't lying
when I joined the faculty, and for a long time now I have been
waiting in the shadows to strike. But as I wrote this keynote, I
realized that I am the "Indian" Manchurian Candidate. I didn't
know that I was meant to blow up my program! Or at least try.
My true consciousness was buried, and then something
triggered me, and the hijacker, the shooter was reawakened.

You see--I am Bromden.

I was hired to teach ballet, and my bona fides were impeccable.
I was already broken. Reprogrammed. They'd hooked me by
my heels long ago. And all I bled was rust.

My pedigree was unquestioned because it was borne from the
so-called neutral and unmarked foundation from which my
colleagues, themselves, had emerged. Imagine in my job
interview for York, stating that my primary intention was to
teach the students traditional Grass Dancing as the foundation
for their physical work. I wouldn't have been on the short list
very long, no matter my skin color! The value or merit of
classical ballet is unquestioned. Grass Dancing could produce
many of the same benefits--stamina, flexibility, reducing
unwanted tension in our students' bodies--but it would not have
reordered or reprogrammed them to stand around in fair
Verona in the desired way.

Does my desire to do any of this betray the trust of my
colleagues, many of whom I call friends? Does it denigrate
their lifelong study and support of the canon? Does it negate
and mock their wish to pursue it still, make it their practice?

My response comes from Ken Kesey.

{16}
In the novel, the moment when we realize that Bromden is
beginning to heal, to stop that ringing in his head, is the night
he finds himself alone, looking out through the bars of the
hospital. [Underlined by the author for emphasis.]

Looked out the window and saw for the first time how
the hospital was out in the country. The moon was low in
the sky over the pastureland; the face of it was scarred
and scuffed where it had been torn up out of the snarl of
scrub oak and madrone trees on the horizon. The stars up
close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver
the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the
giant moon. (Kesey 128)

For me the "stars" are the work and the art produced by the
members of my community, their brilliance only apparent once
I had removed myself from the false and glaring light of the
Moon. By immersing myself in their processes, their protocols,
their energy, I have begun a reawakening and a defogging. By
doing so, I have reordered my canon.

At the top of the list come new works:

Almighty Voice and His Wife by Daniel David Moses,

Pimootewin by Tomson Highway,

Tombs of the Vanishing Indian by Marie Clements.

These are just a few of the works that I aspire to. This is the
new canon, the new mountain I seek to climb. You could pay
me a million dollars, and I still wouldn't want to direct Hamlet .
. . .

[He stops for a moment, actually realizing
what he just said. Then with the air
of a politician, backtracking at one hundred miles per hour, he continues more
contritely.]

Okay, let me rephrase that.

[Beat.]

I'd take the million dollars, certainly, and then devise a new
work about a small town! And then fund another fifty new
works, for audiences starved for something else, anything else!

{17}
I am not alone in wanting to see the very foundation of the
Academy shift. Both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students
and artists want to see themselves, their interests, their politics
reflected in the curriculum we offer. As one of my colleagues
asked me in a recent meeting, if I no longer believe that this
model can be sustained or championed--what do I suggest to
replace it with? I said I didn't know, but that the discovery of
that new path would excite me for the next twenty years.

In closing, I would like to recall the memory of Malcolm X. In
his autobiography, he describes an all-too-brief engagement
with Islam. For him to embrace Islam beyond the definitions
and history of the Nation of Islam meant, I think, a slow
unraveling of his hatred. In doing so, he moved toward a richer,
more complex understanding of his religion and his purpose as
a human being.

For me, there is a significant parallel--I've lived for a long time
in the Machine--and this, too, has required a slow unraveling of
the colonial mentality, extricating myself . . .

[with a growing
fierceness]

. . . from its grammar, its narrowness, and its arrogance.

[He regards the audience
intensely.]

I played Bromden once . . .

and that was their first mistake.

[The actor, finally free, steps back from the
podium.]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to thank Ken Kesey and Dale Wasserman,
whose work I have quoted liberally in this address, as well as
Ric Knowles, whom I also quoted in my Whiteness lecture and
wish to thank for his role in my reawakening. I also thank
Helen Gilbert for inviting me to present this keynote address.

{18}

WORKS CITED

Forman, Miloš, dir. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
United Artists, 1975.
Film.

Wasserman, Dale. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: A Play in
Two Acts.
1970. New York: Samuel French, 2000. Print.

{19}

From Father to
Son
Affirming Lakota Manhood in Luther Standing Bear's My
People the Sioux

PETER L.
BAYERS

"I wanted to watch my father, because, as I have said before, he
was my ideal" (79). This passage--from Luther Standing Bear's
autobiography My People the Sioux (1928)--refers to a moment
in Luther Standing Bear's childhood as he watched his father
prepare to capture wild horses. Standing Bear's sentiment--that
his father was his "ideal"--permeates his autobiography as he
recounts his childhood, boarding school experience, and
postschool life. In fact, My People the Sioux underscores the
centrality of Standing Bear's relationship with his father and its
role in the shaping of his Lakota manhood as he negotiated the
challenges of the dominant culture and its gender expectations
as it worked to "civilize" Natives through such policies as the
Allotment Act of 1887 and the creation of Federal boarding
schools.1 Though white advocates of assimilation expected
Natives to be fully compliant to Euro-American gender norms,
Natives themselves often had a more complicated response to
this goal. Such is the case with the Lakota writer Luther
Standing Bear, who worked to find ways to maintain traditional
Lakota male gender norms as he adjusted to the historical force
of assimilation. Though assimilationist policies and institutions
often caused devastating psychological trauma on Natives,
particularly on boys and girls who attended boarding schools,
Luther Standing Bear was not traumatized by his boarding
school experience at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. For
Standing Bear the key to maintaining this psychological
stability was his close identification with his father. My People,
in fact, is carefully structured to first establish how Standing
Bear absorbed Lakota masculine norms from his father before
he was immersed in Euro-American culture. As the narrative
progresses and Standing Bear describes his transition to and
education at Carlisle, he describes how his father continued to
play {20} a key role in how he measured himself as a
Lakota
man, a dynamic that continued throughout his life. As My
People illustrates, Standing Bear's relationship with his father
provided the cultural anchor that allowed him to proactively
sustain a distinctly Lakota manhood despite the pressures of
assimilation efforts on the part of Euro-America.My People the Sioux is carefully designed to
appeal to the
sensibilities of a white readership, as Ryan Burt and Daniel
Moos have both argued. Burt states that Standing Bear's central
goal in the narrative is to dispel white stereotypes of Natives as
bloodthirsty savages (629). According to Moos, Standing Bear
takes liberties with his early life in order to idealize Lakota life
before "contact" to appeal to his white audience's romantic
conceptions of Plains Indians and to portray himself as
someone who has successfully "bridged the gap of pre-contact
and post-contact culture" (189).2 I argue, however, that
Standing Bear's autobiography is also a window into how the
transition into the "post-contact" era was not necessarily a
one-way street for Native peoples. His idealization of his life
under the tutelage of his father is constructed to underscore
how Standing Bear's manhood was not only shaped by Lakota
cultural expectations before "contact," but also how his
upbringing prepared him to negotiate the "post-contact" world
in accordance with those expectations.
As a student at Carlisle, Standing Bear was subjected to a
curriculum that was designed to eradicate any vestige of Native
cultural identity. Specifically, the superintendent of the school,
Captain Richard Henry Pratt, hoped that "[i]n an isolated
institutional setting, [he could] destroy what he termed 'savage
languages,' 'primitive superstitions,' and 'uncivilized cultures,'
replacing them with work ethics, Christian values, and the
white man's civilization. In sum, Pratt created Carlisle as a
space to take 'the savage-infant to the surroundings of
civilization'" (Trafzer, Keller, and Sisquoc, "Origin" 13).
Though eradicating "savagery" was the goal of Indian boarding
schools such as Carlisle, Native children did not necessarily
succumb to this assault on their respective heritages. As David
Wallace Adams explains, the success of the assimilation
process at boarding schools was not seamless; rather, "the
acculturation process itself could involve various forms of
selective incorporation, syncretization, and
compartmentalization, . . . for Indian students were anything
but passive recipients of the curriculum of civilization"
(Education 335). And based on her analysis of boarding school
student writings,3 Amelia V. Katanski argues that "[a]lthough
they did not possess unlimited {21} freedom to
self-identity, or
to be simultaneously utterly traditional and utterly assimilated,
most of these students had some degree of agency to choose
when and how to exercise various identities within their
repertoires" (8), including their gender identities as boarding
schools worked to regender Native children in accordance with
the norms of the dominant culture.
In keeping with Euro-American gender expectations, boys
at the schools were taught to be laborers or agriculturalists, and
in classic Victorian fashion Native girls were taught to be
homemakers, seamstresses, domestic workers, or perhaps
teachers.4 As Renya K. Ramirez writes, "The boarding schools'
purpose [. . .] was to insert patriarchy into tribal communities
and to socialize children to believe in patriarchal gender
norms" of Euro-America (28). Adams writes that "[w]hen [the
boarding school experience] was all over, the onetime youthful
specimens of savagism would be thoroughly Christianized,
individualized, and republicanized, fit candidates for American
citizenship" ("Beyond" 36) as proper Victorian men and
women. In the case of Native males, once they graduated and
returned to their respective reservations, it was expected that
they would leverage their individual skills to compete in the
market economy as heads of their nuclear families. As Joel
Pfister has argued, Euro-American methods to "kill the Indian"
to "save the man" meant that for Native boys, "[m]anliness was
scripted in exclusively capitalist terms: competing in the
marketplace, laboring in prescribed fashion at particular
occupations, and supporting oneself independent of the
government. No other cultural invention of manhood was
credited" (Pfister 62).5 Pfister may be technically correct that
no other version of manhood "was credited," but Standing
Bear's My People the Sioux illustrates that other options could
be exercised.
Luther Standing Bear's narrative is compelling for what it
suggests about the complex ways in which many male Native
students may have maintained elements of a traditional gender
identity despite the enormous pressures of assimilation. In
making this claim, I do not mean to make a sweeping
generalization about how Native boys in the late nineteenth
century reacted to their boarding school experiences. After all,
"Native Americans, past and present, assess the boarding
school experience differently, but many themes emerge that
offer an introduction into the student's world in transition from
reservation life to the institutionalization at boarding schools"
(Trafzer, Keller, and Sisquoc, "Origin"{22} 17), which in
Standing Bear's case means that he leveraged his understanding
of Lakota gender expectations to frame and shape himself in
his transition from a traditional Lakota upbringing to the
expectations of Carlisle. In fact, in large part the first twelve
chapters of My People the Sioux are framed to illustrate the
formation--under his father's guidance--of Standing Bear's
Lakota manhood, which in turn frames how to read Standing
Bear's boarding school experience. Standing Bear's "father
played a tremendously significant role in My People" in terms
of "authenticating" his Lakota identity for his white audience,
as Ryan Burt has pointed out (630), but I argue that his father
also played a key role in Standing Bear's successful negotiation
of his boarding school experiences as a Lakota adolescent, an
experience that for many Native boys was traumatizing. His
close identification with his father, who, through example and
ritual, carefully transmitted Lakota gender expectations to his
son, gave Standing Bear the tools to not only reframe his
experiences at Carlisle through a Lakota lens, but also to
establish a distinctly Lakota identity in his post-Carlisle years.
The centrality of Standing Bear's father as his masculine
ideal is established from the first pages of My People. After
briefly explaining the context of his birth in the first two
paragraphs of the narrative, Standing Bear devotes the next
section of the first chapter to recounting his father's "coup tale,"
and how his achievement led to the acquisition of his father's
name, "Standing Bear." For Plains Indians "counting coup on
the enemy was considered a great act of bravery" (Thom 53).
Hertha Dawn Wong explains, "On returning from battle with
fellow warrior-witnesses to vouch for his words, the warrior
would narrate his martial accomplishments to his community.
This was a way to keep the community informed about its
warriors and for the narrator to articulate his personal
experience and his new standing in the tribe" (26), and a means
by which a Native man affirmed his masculine identity (see
Thom 24). In his recollection of his father's coup tale Luther
Standing Bear explains that in a skirmish with the Pawnee, his
father and other warriors touched a Pawnee, who in turn
wounded all the men. According to Standing Bear, as the first
to touch the Pawnee warrior, his father recalled, "[a]t the next
council Chief Two Strikes proposed me as a chief, because I
was brave enough to face the enemy, even if that enemy was
ready to shoot me. So I was accepted and elected as a chief
under the name of 'Standing Bear'" (6). Standing Bear's
recollection of his father's {23} deed--an implicit
validation of
his father's Lakota manhood--is powerful in and of itself as a
marker of Standing Bear's respect for his father.
But chapter 1 is also designed to ground Standing Bear's
Lakota masculine lineage, a lineage that he will honor through
his own actions. After his father's coup story, Standing Bear
explains how his father gave him a gift of bows and arrows and
then taught him how to use them. Standing Bear writes, "Some
day, [my father] said, he would like to see me go on the
war-path and earn my own credits. So I kept my bow and
arrows near me all the time, as it told of my father's bravery, of
which I was very proud, as every one in camp knew my father
had been wounded in battle" (9). The bow and arrow is quite
literally a symbol of Standing Bear's father's expectations for
him as a man--to honor the gift is to honor his father's
manhood, a manhood he is expected to replicate.
When Standing Bear uses his bow and arrow successfully to
shoot a bird, his father once again honors his growth toward
manhood by giving away a horse. The story is then followed by
a tale of Standing Bear's participation in a deer hunt with other
boys, which proves successful when one of the boys shoots a
deer. Given that "'Ota Kte,' or 'Plenty Kill'" (Standing Bear's
name as a boy) participated in the hunt, his father has the
"camp crier" announce that Standing Bear "had brought home
his first meat," and he gives away yet another "pony." The
chapter concludes with Standing Bear remarking, "My father
felt so proud of me that he was happy to do this" (12). The
ritual of the "give away" not only honors Standing Bear but
also signals his future Lakota male role as a provider who will
practice generosity as a masculine virtue (Brave Heart 179). As
the Yankton writer Ella Deloria underscores in her Speaking of
Indians, which details the devastating effects of the reservation
system on Dakota culture, males who practiced generosity and
self-sacrifice were held in high regard by the community (68).
And as she writes in her ethnographic novel Waterlily, these
virtues were "what men lived by," for their "social standing and
reputation hinged on it" (32).
The first chapter, then, both begins and ends with stories
that affirm acts and virtues of Lakota manhood. That Standing
Bear begins his autobiography and devotes the first chapter to
Lakota manhood--a manhood that is modeled by his father and
his father's validation of Standing Bear's own
manhood--underscores the importance of masculinity to
Standing Bear, as well as provides a lens through which to
understand the trajectory of the autobiography. That is, My
People the {24} Sioux is a carefully
crafted remembrance of
Standing Bear's boyhood that works to firmly establish his
identity as grounded in Lakota expectations of manhood as he
leads up to his carefully scripted description of his departure
for Carlisle.
Indeed, as Standing Bear continues to detail his traditional
upbringing as a Lakota male in the early chapters, he makes
explicit references to "manhood" in order to underscore the
stakes of his relationship with his father--for instance,
remarking, "One day, when I was playing outside, my father
called for me. I went home with him, and he gave me a horse
and all the things necessary to make a man of me" (28).
Standing Bear also devotes a chapter to his first buffalo hunt,
which, like his first hunt as a child, is symbolically framed by
his father's gift of a new bow and arrows for the hunt (60).
After this tale Standing Bear states: "[M]y father always talked
to me as if I were a man. Of course, I now felt that I was big
enough to do a man's work" (61). The centrality of his father's
validation of his identity is again underscored when Standing
Bear remarks that his father "was so pleased that I had tried to
do my best" after coming upon Standing Bear as he was
skinning a buffalo (65).
Structured around his relationship with his father, chapter 7
is in part devoted to Standing Bear's first experience on a war
party, another key ritual in the formation of Lakota manhood,
one that symbolized his initiation as one of the tribe's "Wiscasa
was ak" or "strong men," responsible for protecting the tribe
(Brave Heart 179). In preparation for a raid on the Ponca,
Standing Bear recalls that his father told him, "'Son, I wanted
you to come with me, because I wanted you to do something of
great bravery or get killed on the battlefield," and he goes on to
explain that he wants Standing Bear to ride into the Ponca
camp unarmed, carrying only a long stick (75-76). His father
continues that after a man comes out of his lodge, "Touch that
man with your stick, then ride through the camp as fast as your
horse can run. I will be behind you, and, if you pass through
without any harm, you will be the youngest man that has ever
done such a thing, and I will be proud of you" (76). If Standing
Bear were to "fall in their midst," he must "keep [his] courage"
(77). He finishes with, "That is the way I want you to die. I will
be with you, my son" (76). According to Standing Bear, this
moment had a powerful impact on him. He explains, "This
made my heart beat so loud I could hear it, and the tears came
into my eyes; but I was willing to do my father's bidding, as I
wanted so much to please him" (76). As it turns out, the {25}
raid was called off, and Standing Bear was prevented from
acting on his father's request, which made Standing Bear feel
"ashamed for having to turn back without even seeing an
enemy from a distance," and that he "had to go home without
having taken a chance of getting killed" (76-77). In the latter
part of the chapter, subtitled "Wild Horses," the depth of
Standing Bear's identification with is father is underscored
repeatedly. Preparing to capture wild horses, Standing Bear
remarks, "I was watching every move he made. I noticed that
every little while he would whip up his running-horse, to 'warm
him up,' as a white man would express it. Whenever my father
did this, I imitated him" (78). Later he writes, "I was not paying
much attention to what the other riders were doing, as I wanted
to watch my father, because, as I have said before, he was my
ideal" (79). The chapter concludes with, "Even though I never
had the opportunity of catching any wild horses, I can at least
say that I know how it is accomplished. It was my father's wish
that I learn all about our people and their way of living, and to
learn all I could while I was young" (81). The broad cultural
knowledge--a knowledge that is passed from father to son--is at
the same time a knowledge that is in large part framed by his
father, Standing Bear's "ideal" of Lakota manhood.
The chapter that bridges Standing Bear's "pre" and
"post-contact" years and codifies the masculine ideals passed
from father to son is devoted to an ethnography of the Sun
Dance. At the beginning of this chapter Standing Bear claims
that he witnessed what was perhaps the last Sun Dance ever
held, an event that occurred "[a]s [he] started for Carlisle
Indian School in the fall of 1879" (113). That Standing Bear
explicitly links the Sun Dance to his departure for Carlisle is
crucial to understanding his transition to Carlisle and its impact
on his masculinity. In one sense, the "last" Sun Dance can be
read as an explicit symbol signaling the end of Standing Bear's
traditional life--and by extension his role as a male in that
life--given that the Sun Dance was the most important and
sacred ceremony in Lakota culture. At the same time, this
strategically placed chapter implicitly affirms the extensive
lessons he had learned about Lakota manhood through his
relationship with his father. Standing Bear calls the dance a
"sacrificial" act to "Wakan Tanka" (113), an act that renews the
Lakota people and their interdependent relationship with the
land and cosmos. Penelope Myrtle Kelsey writes, "It is anpetu
wi [the masculine principle] who is celebrated each August in
the Sun Dance" (94). Standing Bear describes in detail the Sun
Dance {26} rituals that affirm Lakota masculinity. He
explains
how once the site of the Sun Dance was selected, warriors
would "attack" the site through an "imitation charge on the
camp" (114), perform acts of "coup" after the selection of the
sacred pole (115-16), and "attack" an "effigy of a man made
from the limbs of trees" (116). Standing Bear witnessed the
culmination of the Sun Dance when male warriors would have
their breasts pierced by bone, which were then attached by
rawhide to the sacred pole. As Standing Bear remarks, "friends
or relatives of the young brave would sing and praise him for
his courage" as he danced to "tear out the wooden pin fastened
through his breasts" (121). The ultimate goal of the Sun Dance
is for warriors to display their willingness to courageously
sacrifice themselves for the community--a key marker of
Lakota masculinity.6 Standing Bear concludes this chapter, "As
I have many times related in my story, I always wanted to be
brave, but I do not think I could ever have finished one of these
Sun Dances" (122). That Standing Bear points out that he
"always wanted to be brave" echoes the masculine values
transmitted to him by his father, and sets the stage for his
description of his time at Carlisle. His gesture of doubt about
his own ability to participate in the ritual at first glance might
seem to reflect his own unease about his masculinity. But this
passage is very much in keeping with Lakota masculine virtue
in that it affirms that Standing Bear is properly humble. At the
same time, the passage does not fore-close the possibility that
Standing Bear would be capable of enduring the ritual given
that he, as he will show his readers, has affirmed what he sees
as his distinctly Lakota masculine achievements in his life
subsequent to witnessing the Sun Dance.
As My People unfolds, Standing Bear
transposes this
knowledge to his new setting in Euro-American culture to
counter any notion that his transition to boarding school life
meant that he was blindly subscribing to Richard Pratt's goal of
"killing the Indian to save the man" at Carlisle. Standing Bear's
narrative, in fact, is similar in its goals to that of other Native
writers of the era such as Charles Alexander Eastman. As Erik
Peterson argues, in his writings Eastman worked to create
cultural continuity between his traditional Native upbringing
(in this case Dakota) and Euro-American culture (150), an
argument that is also made by Kelsey, who writes that
"Eastman had a specific agenda in terms of asserting
Indigenous equality and Dakota nationhood in the face of
assimilation" (45). In terms of Eastman's assertion of Dakota
masculinity in particular, I {27} have argued elsewhere
(Bayers) that he maintained his Dakota masculine identity by
creating parallels between Dakota masculine norms and those
of the Euro-American culture. Similarly, Standing Bear's
notion of what it meant to be Lakota was not intrinsically tied
to a static notion of culture; rather, Standing Bear worked
carefully to frame his experiences within Euro-American
culture through what Kelsey would argue is a distinctly "tribal
worldview," which is to say "a way of knowing and
understanding predicated upon an identifiable number of
qualities specific to a tribal group" (12). Importantly, "these
qualities" can "change and transform over time" but are still
"unique" to that tribe (12).
As Standing Bear describes the process through which he
decided to attend Carlisle, he is careful to link this transitional
moment to his relationship with his father. Recalling the
context of his decision to go east, Standing Bear recounts an
encounter he had with some white men and a white woman,
and how an "interpreter told us [Standing Bear and a friend] if
we would go East . . . [we could] learn the ways of the white
man" (124), which he disparagingly frames as little more than
"'sweet talk,' especially when these interpreters were paid by
the Government for talking" (124). Challenging any notion that
his decision to go east was predicated on his rejection of
Lakota manhood, Standing Bear continues: "My mind was
working in an entirely different channel. I was thinking of my
father, and how he had many times said to me, 'Son, be brave!
Die on the battle-field if necessary away from home. It is better
to die young than to get old and sick and then die.' When I
thought of my father, and how he had smoked the pipe of
peace, and was not fighting any more, it occurred to me that
this chance to go East would prove that I was brave if I were to
accept it" (124). But Standing Bear's decision as to whether to
act on his desire must be sanctioned by his father, who, along
with Standing Bear, meets with the party of whites and the
interpreter. His father asks him whether he wants to go east, to
which he replies yes, after which they depart for home. During
this journey, his father remains silent, and Standing Bear
questions whether his father fully approves of his desire, as he
wonders whether his father thinks he will "betray" "my own
people" (125). Whatever misgivings he may have had,
Standing Bear's father nonetheless performs a ritualized act of
a giveaway to sanction Standing Bear's departure for Carlisle.
As Standing Bear writes, his father "invited all the people who
lived near by to come to his place" (125), a dry goods store that
his father owned. {28} "He got all the goods down off the
shelves in his store and carried them outside. Then he brought
in about seven head of ponies. When all the people were
gathered there, he gave away all these things because I was
going away East. I was going with the white people, and
perhaps might never return; so he was sacrificing all his
worldly possessions" (125). That Standing Bear's father honors
him with a giveaway as he prepares to depart for Carlisle
explicitly links this moment to the other giveaways of his
"pre-contact" upbringing recounted earlier in the narrative,
moments that signified masculine achievement as Standing
Bear was tutored in the roles and values of Lakota manhood.
This moment clearly signifies that Standing Bear's impending
description of his journey east was to be filtered through a
Lakota cultural lens, one that would reinforce his male role in
Lakota culture.
As a result, it is not surprising that on one of the early stages
of his journey east--a steamboat ride--Standing Bear recalls, "It
did not occur to me at that time that I was going away to learn
the ways of the white man. My idea was that I was leaving the
reservation and going to stay away long enough to do some
brave deed, and then come home again alive" (128). Once
again, his perspective is specifically framed by his father's
teachings. Standing Bear remarks, "If I could do just that, then I
knew my father would be so proud of me" (128). Standing Bear
reinforces his father's teachings in his description of his arrival
at Carlisle. He again explains that his trip east was to illustrate
his bravery to his fellow Lakota (135). Later he recounts a
scene in which he and his fellow students are to select an
Anglo name listed on the blackboard that will be sewn on the
back of their shirts. Standing Bear explains that "[w]hen my
turn came, I took the pointer and acted as if I were about to
touch an enemy" (137), a moment that parallels his father's
coup tale at the beginning of My People. As Amelia V.
Katanski points out, this gesture is "an assertion of Lakota
identity in a threatening moment" (12), or more to the point, it
is an "assertion" of Standing Bear's Lakota masculinity.
Up to this section of the narrative, Standing Bear describes
his relationship with his father--and the lessons he internalized
from him--confidently, clearly affirming their relationship and
its lessons. However, in a moment of seeming crisis that
undermines his father's teachings, Standing Bear describes his
feelings when his hair is cut by the Carlisle barber:

Right here I must state how this hair-cutting affected me
in various ways. I have recounted that I always wanted to
please my {29} father in every way possible. All his
instructions to me had been along this line: "Son, be
brave and get killed." This expression had been moulded
into my brain to such an extent that I knew nothing else.
But my father had made a mistake. He should have
told me, upon leaving home, to go and learn all I could of
the white man's ways, and be like them. That would have
given me a new idea from a different slant; but Father did
not advise me along that line. I had come away from
home with the intention of never returning alive unless I
had done something very brave.
Now, after having had my hair cut, a new thought
came into my head. I felt that I was no more Indian, but
would be an imitation of a white man. And we are still
imitations of white men. (141)

If taken at face value, this passage marks the moment in which
Standing Bear is cut off from any semblance of Lakota
manhood. His father, the key figure in the development of
Standing Bear's male Lakota identity, has seemingly failed
Standing Bear as he is abruptly "no more Indian" to the point
that his new masculine identity is little more than an "imitation
of a white man." Given his deep emotional relationship with
his father, a relationship predicated on shaping the very core of
Standing Bear's identity as a Lakota man, one might expect this
moment to have traumatized him. Standing Bear recovers from
this moment, however, by continuing to closely identify with
his father's traditional teachings while simultaneously claiming
that "we are still imitations of white men."
After this passage, Standing Bear quickly recuperates his
relationship with his father by situating him within the arc of
progressive ideology. Standing Bear remarks, "I now began to
realize that I would have to learn the ways of the white man.
With that idea in mind, the thought also came to me that I must
please my father as well" by becoming his interpreter, or by
being his father's bookkeeper at his store (147). Standing Bear
then recounts his father's visit to Carlisle, explaining that when
his father arrived, all the boys at the school enthusiastically
greeted him to the point that Standing Bear "had to fight my
way through to reach him. He was glad to see me, and I was so
delighted to see him" (149). During the visit, his father
explained to Standing Bear that he wanted his son to "learn all
[he] can" and that he "will see that your brothers and sisters
follow in the path that you are making for them," and that he
{30} wanted him to "speak like these Long Knife people,
and
work like them" (151-52). To this, Standing Bear comments,
"This was the first time my father had ever spoken to me
regarding acquiring a white man's education," relieving any
anxiety he had about failing his father. He claims: "it meant so
much to me. He was so serious in his conversation along this
line that I felt quite 'puffed up'" (152). In his father's validation
of his education, this moment might be initially read as his
father's--and Standing Bear's--final capitulation to Carlisle's
goal of shaping Native boys to fit Anglo masculine norms.
But this section of the narrative, as it turns out, does not
simply register a "before and after" transformation in Standing
Bear's masculine identity.7 At the same time that he met the
gender expectations of Carlisle, he still very much defined
himself within Lakota cultural norms, a definition that remains
codified through his relationship with his father. For instance,
following his father's approval of his education at Carlisle,
central tropes of Lakota masculinity continue to be repeated as
the narrative progresses, and they are carefully connected to
Standing Bear's identification with his father. For example,
Standing Bear recalls that his father made him feel "puffed up,"
and he remarks, "I wanted to please him in everything--even to
getting killed on the battlefield. Even that I was willing to
endure" (156). And soon after, Standing Bear recounts the story
of how Chief Spotted Tail visited the school, and upon his
return home he was murdered. Standing Bear remembers, "Of
course we imagined he had been killed by the white people,
and we began to think of war again. The big boys told us, 'If the
Indians go on the war-path now, we will all be killed at this
school'" (156), to which Standing Bear reflected, "However,
this suited me, as I was willing to die right there, just as I had
promised when leaving home" (157). Standing Bear then
explains that it was in truth a fellow Lakota who killed Spotted
Tail, but he nonetheless concludes the chapter: "Sometimes we
felt that we were in a very tight place, miles from our homes,
and among white people, where we felt that at the least show of
trouble we would all be killed; but we were always ready"
(160). At another point, Lakota masculine values are reinforced
when Standing Bear explains that the secretary of the interior
visited the school, and that the secretary asked if the students,
as promised, would like to return home after their three years at
Carlisle. According to Standing Bear, "I did not raise mine [my
hand]. I would like to have done so, but the words of my father
seemed to come {31} to me: 'Son, learn all you can of the
ways
of these Long Knives (white people) as they are so thick in our
country.' So I wanted to be brave and stay to please my father"
(174), a sentiment he repeats on the following page, when he
writes that he "was determined to be brave and 'stick it out'" at
Carlisle (175). As Standing Bear's recollections underscore, his
father's traditional teachings about Lakota manhood were
central to how he understood himself as he negotiated his schooling.
Though I read his school experiences under Pratt as an
affirmation of his relationship with his father, Lucy Maddox
has argued that the presence of Pratt in Standing Bear's life
posed a problem for him in his relationship with his father.
Maddox writes, "What distinguishes his Carlisle narrative from
other boarding school reminiscences is Standing Bear's focus
on the problem that seemed to worry him most--figuring out
how to please, simultaneously, two men (who could hardly
have been more different from each other) whom he admired
and whose approval he very much desired: his father and
Richard Pratt" (156). Maddox argues that Standing Bear saw
his attendance at Carlisle "as an actual form of betrayal of his
father" (156). At the same time, of course, Standing Bear's
betrayal of his father would have meant a betrayal of the values
of Lakota manhood. While there's no question that Standing
Bear was concerned that he was betraying his father, given his
need for his father's validation of his decision to attend
Carlisle, I argue that Standing Bear's portrayal of Pratt carefully
situates Pratt within his father's teachings in order to counteract
any notion that this was ever the case.
For example, Standing Bear explains that after he
volunteered to remain at Carlisle, Pratt "then complimented me
on my bravery in remaining to learn more" (175). Standing
Bear then explains that Pratt arranged to have him work for
famed Philadelphia department store owner John Wanamaker.
Pointing to the stereotype of Native men as "lazy," Pratt stated
to Standing Bear, "'Now you are going to prove that the red
man can learn and work as well as the white man'" (178,
original emphasis). According to Standing Bear, Pratt later
remarked, "'Go, my boy, and do your best. Die there if
necessary, but do not fail'" (179). He even goes as far as to
remark that at one point, "[e]very thought that passed through
my mind seemed to end in that expression of Captain Pratt's:
'To die there if necessary'" (179-80). Standing Bear's bravery in
the face of death, imagined throughout the text as an extension
of his father's teachings about Lakota manhood, was seemingly
co-opted by {32} his white mentor, Pratt. But it is
difficult to
imagine that Pratt--whose stated goal was to eradicate any
vestiges of Native cultures--would have encouraged Standing
Bear to imagine his impending journey to Philadelphia within
the discourse of Lakota masculinity. Rather, I argue that
Standing Bear's depiction of Pratt is a rhetorical maneuver
designed to insert Pratt within the recognizable discourse
taught by his father. In other words, Standing Bear is not
concerned about betraying his father by following Pratt's
desires when he goes to Wanamaker's; he is in fact once again
extending his father's precepts as he negotiates the challenges
of learning and working within Euro-American society. If
there's any question that Standing Bear was simply following
Pratt's wishes and not following his role as a Lakota male, he
writes that following Pratt's supposed words, "I felt as if I
should burst out crying. I was not so brave that night, after all.
If I had not cared for my race, all the strong impressions would
have had no effect upon me, but the thought of working for my
race brought tears to my eyes. You must remember that I was
just a small boy at that time" (179). As this passage's strategic
location underscores, the decision to work at Wanamaker's was
clearly not about following Pratt's desires; rather, in keeping
with the values of Lakota manhood, Standing Bear's actions are
measured by their ability to serve his fellow Lakota, a virtue
central to Lakota manhood.
His father's approval of his education signals that Standing
Bear had the license to extend the parameters of Lakota
manhood despite the demands of progressive ideology or, if
need be, he could "wear" multiple identities depending on the
context. To "imitate" the white man, in other words, speaks to
Standing Bear's keen awareness of the constructed nature of
identity. As Moos writes, "he is an imitation of white man, yet
he is not white" (191). To Moos this trope reveals that
"Standing Bear becomes less of an authentic individual identity
and more of a trope," even in his construction of himself as
"Indian," which is to say that he is doing little more than
performing Indianness to meet his white audiences'
expectations (191). But I argue that Standing Bear's remark that
he was "no more Indian" is not an acknowledgment of some
kind of performative inauthenticity; rather, it is his recognition
that his pre-boarding school male self is no longer sustainable
in its "old form." Nonetheless, as his sentiments about his
courageous readiness for death underscore, he can still adhere
to recognizable masculine expectations of his Lakota tribal
worldview as they are transposed to this new context.{33}
In his assertion of Lakota manhood through his relationship
with his father, Standing Bear was not without what one might
argue are contradictions. As Standing Bear explains in his
chapter 20, "Trouble at the Agency," the Lakota debated
whether they should accept the tenets of the Allotment Act, the
goal of which was to give each male Native the opportunity to
embrace the values of private property by farming his land and
provide for his nuclear family. In accepting allotment Lakota
males risked relinquishing their ties to their Lakota gender
identity for, as Thomas Biolosi points out, they would "be
forced to conform to a certain minimum definition of modern
individuality. In this way, [Lakota males] would be constituted
as social persons who could fit into the American nation-state
and the market system of metropolitan capitalism" (30).
Standing Bear explains that most Lakota leaders were against
allotment, but that his father argued in its favor. According to
Standing Bear, he was proud that his father was the first to sign
the treaty (215-16). At the beginning of the following chapter
Standing Bear goes as far as to say, "From the day my father
signed the treaty, we all began to realize that we were to have
something given us which was to be our own--and the thought
of ownership gives any one a higher appreciation of life,
regardless of how little that ownership may be" (217). And of
course his various occupations, all of which he
embraced--salaried teacher on the reservation, owner of a
general store at Rosebud, rancher, performer with Buffalo Bill,
Hollywood actor--seem to be straightforward examples of a
manhood defined by "capitalist terms."
Yet for Standing Bear's father, and Standing Bear in turn,
how Lakota manhood was shaped was not an either/or
proposition as they faced the historical reality of assimilation
through such policies as allotment. As the ceremony in which
Standing Bear became an Oglala Chief illustrates, he--and
according to his account his fellow Lakota--did not see his life
as contradictory as he continued to ground his masculine
identity upon his father's example. Standing Bear recalls:

One of the old men then arose and recounted many
interesting incidents about my father; what a brave man
he had been, and not afraid to stand up for his people, but
had fought for their rights.
Another of the old chiefs then spoke to me. He said,
"We have made you chief because we feel that you will
be able to take the place of your father." He then told me
all that the people would expect of me, and for me to do
all I could for the sake of my people. {34}
I told them I did not expect ever to be as great a man
as my father had been, but that I would do all in my
power to help my people at all times, regardless of where
I might be. That was the oath I took when I became chief
of the Oglala Sioux, the greatest Indian tribe in the
United States.
The chiefs then began to sing a brave song, and all got
up to dance. Now that I was one of them, I had to dance
with them. (274)

The memorial to his father reinscribes Standing Bear's deep
identification with Lakota masculinity as represented by his
father and his bravery, as well as his father's dedication and
sacrifice for his fellow Lakota. In what might at first seem
ironic, Standing Bear's allusion to his father's commitment to
"his people" references his father's role in advocating on behalf
of the Lakota in Washington DC, where, according to Standing
Bear, he went frequently to "explain what was wanted for the
benefit of the Sioux Nation" (168-69), which in his case meant
asking for resources so the Lakota could farm their allotments.8
In other words, Standing Bear Sr. is praised by his fellow
Lakota and Standing Bear for promoting a policy that was,
from the perspective of the US government, antithetical to
Lakota values. But this section of the narrative suggests that
from Standing Bear's perspective, adhering to allotment did not
mean that a Lakota male was abandoning any semblance of
Lakota manhood. If from the perspective of the US government
allotment meant the erasure of the Lakota manhood as
individual men worked to benefit themselves and their nuclear
families only, to the Lakota an individual man's success as a
farmer meant nothing unless the entire tribe benefited as a
whole from farming practices. Standing Bear's becoming a
chief is hardly a celebration of his conversion to
Euro-American manhood; rather, it signals that his masculine
achievement is consistent with the tenets of Lakota culture, a
culture that was (and is) not frozen in time.
In the ensuing years, Standing Bear's commitment not only
to the preservation of Lakota masculinity but also--as his Land
of the Spotted Eagle (1933) illustrates--Lakota culture in its
entirety, became more radicalized. Standing Bear had spent
considerable time away from Pine Ridge, moving to
Hollywood in 1912 to act in motion pictures. His perspective
regarding assimilation polices was upended in 1931 when,
sixteen years after his last visit to Pine Ridge, he returned home
from Hollywood and witnessed the crushing weight of US
assimilation policies and their genocidal legacy.9{35} Despite
his now radical stance toward assimilation policies, however,
the effects of those policies continued to plague the Lakota at
Pine Ridge (and the greater Lakota Nation) throughout the
twentieth century and still do today. In regard to US policies
and their effects on father/son relationships in Lakota culture,
Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart writes, "The erosion of
fathering among Lakota men, in part the result of the
destructive influences of boarding schools that undermined
traditional parenting roles, has contributed to confusion among
boys and a lack of clarity regarding the meaning of becoming
wicasa was'aka [strong men]" (179).10 As Luther Standing
Bear's My People illustrates, not all boarding school
experiences led to a boy's confusion about what constituted
wicasa was'aka, but only because of the deeply established
traditional relationship between father and son, a relationship
that left a lasting impression on Standing Bear and the shaping
of his manhood. My People the Sioux, however, need not be a
historical artifact only; for the Lakota it might be utilized as an
important contemporary resource to help foster the already
robust spirit of contemporary pan-Indian organizations such as
the Native American Fatherhood and Families Association
(NAFFA) and its sponsorship of its annual "International Native
American Responsible Fatherhood Day." First held on June 15,
2013, this day helps to affirm the centrality of the father/child
relationship as part of tribal healing, sustainability, or both.11
For those Lakota men who participate in or embrace the goals
of NAFFA, Standing Bear's My People the Sioux is
potentially a
foundational Lakota resource that contemporary Lakota men
can use to continue their work of sustaining or resuscitating
traditional father/son relationships and their crucial role in
affirming wiscasa was' aka and, in turn, the Lakota nation.

.

NOTES
1. On allotment policy and its effects on the Lakota, see
Gibbon, chapter 6,
"Assimilation and Allotment, 1889-1934," 134-61.
2. Frederick Hale too has called Standing Bear "unabashedly
romantic"
regarding his early life (27).
3. As Katanski writes, "The combination of verbal skills and
group
identification developed in Indian boarding schools produced a range of
texts--from legal briefs to congressional testimony to autobiographical
narratives, poetry, fiction, and plays--that explicitly concern themselves with
tribal and indigenous sovereignty" (9).
4. On the importance of gendering Indigenous children in
the boarding
schools, see in particular Trennert 112-49;Adams, Education 173-81; Child
76-80; Paxton 174-86. On the surveillance of the female body and boarding
schools see Lomawaima. {36}
5. For a detailed history of the efforts to transform Lakota
men into
capitalist citizens, see Biolosi.
6. See also Bayers, who points to the importance of the Sun
Dance to
Lakota manhood as described in Deloria's Waterlily (56).
7. For a discussion of Carlisle and its promotion of its
"before and after"
ideology through photographs by John Nicholas Choate, see Herne 20-33. My
People is a testament to the fact that though the gaze of the camera framed
Carlisle student's within the progressive arc of "civilizing the savage," students
like Standing Bear successfully resisted this narrative.
8. For instance, according to Standing Bear, his father
remarked to the
commissioner of Indian Affairs, "I want to ask that you will put one or two big
stallions at each agency, so we can breed some big horses. We will have to
have bigger horses if we are expected to do farm work" (168). Standing Bear
goes on to write, "Whenever my father went to Washington he did not
complain, but in just a few words he would explain what was wanted for the
benefit of the Sioux Nation, or the Indians as a whole. . . . This happened over
forty years ago, but the Sioux Nation is yet reaping the benefit of my father's
efforts" (168-69).
9. See Hale, particularly 31-40, for a discussion of Standing
Bear's
radicalism. As Hale writes, "To a much greater extent than in My People the
Sioux, white Americans are the imperialist villains of Land of the Spotted
Eagle. Whereas in the former volume Standing Bear had alternatively praised
and vilified them, in the latter book they serve as objects of his almost
unqualified contempt" (37).
10. Of course, the boarding school legacy is just one of the
mechanisms by
which Lakota or Native fathers more broadly have been affected by genocide.
In regard to Native fathers, Jessica Ball remarks that in Canada, "[c]olonial
government interventions disrupted Indigenous families and communities and,
along with ongoing social inequities, created unique challenges for Indigenous
fathers. Removal of children from family care and of families from traditional
territories, along with high rates of incarceration of Indigenous men, have
produced a fissure in the sociocultural transmission of father roles across
generations and created monumental challenges for Indigenous fathers' positive
and sustained involvement with their children" (29).
11. The second annual day was held on June 14,
2014.

WORKS CITED

Adams, David Wallace. "Beyond Bleakness: The Brighter Side of Indian
Boarding School, 1870-1940." Trafzer, Keller, and Sisquoc 35-64.

------. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the
Boarding Schools
Experience, 1875-1928. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1995. Print.

Ball, Jessica. "Fathering in the Shadows: Indigenous Fathers and
Canada's
Colonial Legacies." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science 624.1 (2009): 29-48. Print.

Bayers, Peter L. "Charles Alexander Eastman's From the Deep
Woods to
Civilization{37} and the Shaping of Native Manhood." Studies in American
Indian Literatures 20.3 (2008): 52-73. Print.

Bilosi, Thomas. "The Birth of the Reservation: Making the Modern
Individual
among the Lakota." American Ethnologist 22.1 (1995): 28-53. Print.

Peterson, Erik. "An Indian, an American: Ethnicity, Assimilation and
Balance
in Charles Eastman's From the Deep Woods to Civilization." Studies in
American Indian Literatures 4.2-3 (1992): 145-60. Print.

Wong, Hertha Dawn. Sending My Heart Back across the Years:
Tradition and
Innovation in Native American Autobiography. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.
Print.

{39}

The Politics of
Make-Believe
Dissimulation and Reciprocity in David Treuer's The
Translation of Dr. Apelles

COLLEEN G.
EILS

He felt scanned, read, and consumed, and he had no control
over how they read him or what they told themselves about
him. They could be saying anything. They probably were
saying anything.
--Dr. Apelles

In the translator's note that precedes The Translation of Dr.
Apelles, the translator makes a curious appeal to his reader. He
implores: "I hope you accept this offering, this book, this gift of
beauty, and that you read it to the end. And then, turn back here
and read it again" (2). The request might be dismissed as
self-indulgent on the part of the translator and could
understandably be forgotten by the end of the book, given the
metafictional gymnastics that drive the narrative. Reading the
novel again, however, allows for an understanding of the text
that focuses on the politics of reading Native literature. The
novel insists on its own fictionality in the service of Native
intellectualism and survivance rather than affirming the value
of love and self-realization for a Native man torn between
cultures and understood through stereotypes, as academic and
popular treatments of Translation suggest. Read against a
legacy of appropriation and exploitation of Native translators,
the novel points to a tradition of dissimulation as resistance to
show the political potential of literary aesthetics. David Treuer
(Leech Lake Ojibwe) depicts Native storytellers as
sophisticated intellectuals capable of displacing existing
centers of knowledge rather than simply bearers of culture.1 In
the final scenes of the book, Treuer has Apelles acknowledge
his readers to implicate the audience in the novel's theorization
of reciprocal reading practices. Rereading the novel, therefore,
entails participating in the novel's {40} meditation on
access,
reciprocity, and the desires that shape what we know and believe.
The novel's translator describes finding a "very particular
book in a vast and wonderful library," from which loose sheets,
"covered with text in a language [he] did not understand" fell
(1). While the translator focuses his efforts on translating the
story on those loose pages--to do so he must find someone who
reads the language to dictate the story to him--the form of the
novel suggests the composite text he first opens: two separate
narratives alternate by chapter for the length of the novel, as if
pages of one were inserted into a bound copy of the other. The
first narrative--which begins with the last sentence of the
translator's note--is a retelling of the Greek pastoral Daphnis
and Chloe, in which two naive orphans find love and sexual
fulfillment in each other through a series of coincidences. In
the novel's retelling, however, the Greek youths are written as
Native characters Bimaadiz and Eta, and the story unfolds on
Ojibwe lands in the nineteenth century.2 The other narrative in
the novel centers on Apelles, a forty-three-year-old Ojibwe
man living in a major US city in the twenty-first century.
Apelles works at RECAP, a library of retired books, and in his
free time he translates obscure Native texts for publication in
academic journals. In part because of his paralyzing fear of
being reduced by stereotypes into a character in "a story like all
the other stories about his people," Apelles has lived a solitary,
private life (203). Faced with increasing loneliness he likens to
the feeling of a book without a reader, however, Apelles risks
becoming a character and undertakes the project of translating
himself "into a language that someone, somewhere, will want
to read" by writing the story of his life and his love for his
non-Native coworker, Campaspe (39).
The two narratives exist next to each other but do not
explicitly intersect until the final pages of the novel when
Campaspe steals the translation Apelles is working on--a story
about their love--and loses it while at work at RECAP. Jealous
coworkers then hide the manuscript pages in a copy of Daphnis
and Chloe, where it is presumably lost forever, stored away
with other "unknown and unloved" books (304). Just as the
story seems to come full circle and solve the puzzle of the
novel's form by suggesting that the composite text, lost as it is
in "a vast and wonderful library," is the source material from
which the translator creates Translation, the narrative ruptures:
Apelles becomes omniscient and, as he reveals himself to be
the story's narrator, divulges that the story he {41} tells
from
the Translator's Note forward is "make-believe," not an actual
account of his life or, in the novel's vocabulary, a faithful
translation (312). At the same moment, Apelles acknowledges
his readers by looking upward from the page, noting "they [the
readers] know me best of all" (313). In breaking narrative
distance, Apelles not only draws attention to his audience's
presence but also reverses the gaze implicit in the act of
reading to implicate readers in the story he tells. Apelles is not
a character-narrator who transparently relates the intimacies of
his life or a "native informant" translating his culture, but a
calculating storyteller who confronts his audience with his own
fictionality to foreclose any possibility that his story might be
mined for cultural truths. Turning back to the Translator's Note
and beginning again, therefore, means contending with
questions of access and the politics of how and why we read
Native literature.
Apelles's insistence on the fictionality of his story and his
recognition of readers' participation in the novel becomes
political when read within a history of exploitation and
appropriation of Native translators' work.3 Linda Tuhiwai
Smith (Maori) explains that under Western imperialism,
Indigenous peoples have been understood as natural "objects of
research" subject to the "ethnographic 'gaze' of anthropology"
(64, 70). Translators became key to early ethnographical
research as what many researchers considered "native
informants" who were expected to transparently relate their
culture to outsiders. To researchers who considered Indigenous
storytellers and translators objects of research, the resulting
Native stories were cultural artifacts, not dynamic, valid forms
of knowledge. Along with other research, these stories were
"collected, classified and then represented in various ways back
to the West," where they were decontextualized and used to
inform detrimental political and social policies, as well as
stereotyped narratives about Natives (1). In the United States,
literature canonized these representations of Natives through
stories of Native absence and constructions of authenticity,
both of which portray Natives as static characters of the past,
incapable of change, of survival, or of contributing
intellectually to the present. These manifest manners, to use
Gerald Vizenor's (White Earth Nation of Minnesota) term for
"the racialist notions and misnomers sustained in archives and
lexicons as 'authentic' representations of indian cultures," did
not strip Natives of their intellectualism or agency, but they
did--and continue to--require Natives to develop creative forms
of sur-{42}vivance, or an "active sense of presence"
(Vizenor,
Preface vii). Treuer points to this history of theft,
appropriation, and manifest manners in several ways, not only
by crafting Translation's narrator as a Native translator and
focusing the novel on questions of personal and cultural
translation, but also by embedding Apelles's story within a
pastoral that capitalizes on stereotyped tropes informed by
irresponsible, exploitative ethnographic fieldwork.
The legacy of such history manifests in Apelles's daily life,
where expectations and stereotypes confine his personal
relationships. Apelles's overwhelming anxiety in the novel
stems from the demands he faces from other characters to act
as a cultural translator, or native informant, for a society in
which familiar representations of Natives predetermine his
story, regardless of the translation he offers. Inevitably, when
people learn he is Native, they ask "What was it like?" and
Apelles "felt he was at a disadvantage because he, and all those
like him, were measured against the stories that were told about
Indians by those who did not know Indians. Not at all like the
way men were measured against the stories about men because,
for most people, men existed in life not just in stories. And
how could he overcome that?" (204, 205). Apelles overcomes
this disadvantage by substituting fiction for the story of his life;
he maintains control over "that sovereign part of himself " and
shifts critical attention from a Native man as an object of study
to a Native story as a site of Native intellectual production
(204). In refusing to play native informant, Apelles participates
in what Audra Simpson (Mohawk) terms "the staking of limits"
(70).4 Apelles offers readers a fictional story rather than
personal testimony to delineate the limits of readers' access to
characters' lives.
Treuer argues for reading Native literature to disrupt
historical power relations by understanding Native storytellers
as intellectual agents. By explicitly limiting readers' access to
his characters, Treuer contests persistent colonial perceptions
of Natives as "natural objects" of study, in what Smith would
term a decolonizing methodology (122).5 The novel's readers
are not privileged recipients of cultural artifacts, but
participants in a challenging intellectual and artistic exchange.
Reading Translation is indeed a challenge; the highly
referential, metatextual narratives highlight the novel's shifting
styles, which mimic and adapt the voices of canonical writers.6
Treuer's play with literary devices, particularly voice,
self-referentiality, and genre, disrupts the narrative to remind
readers {43} the novel is an aesthetic object and work of
fiction. This essay argues that unlike Treuer's critical work on
Native literature, Native American Fiction: A User's Manual
(2006), which does not engage influential contemporary
scholarship in American Indian literary studies, Translation
participates in contemporary critical discourses about Native
literature by carefully employing literary aesthetics to theorize
reciprocal, embodied reading practices that recognize Native
intellectualism and survivance in literature.

THE
AESTHETICS OF DISSIMULATION

Treuer establishes vocabulary for thinking about how
audiences read early in the novel when Apelles makes two
simultaneous discoveries during his biweekly trip to the city
archives: a text in a language only he can understand, and the
fact that he has never been in love. After packing up for the
day, Apelles announces to the reading room librarian, "I am
afraid I have made a discovery," launching into an impromptu
theorization of research and reading. The librarian responds,
"Discoveries are what bring scholars and translators here. You
are here to make them," but Apelles disagrees (32). Echoing
Vine Deloria Jr.'s (Standing Rock Sioux) indictment of the
anthropologist, who "ALREADY KNOWS what he is going to
find" and visits reservations not to learn but "to VERIFY what he
has suspected all along," Apelles explains that he, like other
researchers, does not seek discovery but "evidence" to "confirm
what [he] already know[s]" (Deloria 80; Treuer, Translation
32).7 In Apelles's formulation, reading for evidence in fiction
involves the unilateral process of searching for narratives made
familiar by canonical representations in literature--the same
narratives that resign Apelles to a socially isolated lifestyle and
that affirm the status quo.
Apelles's experience of discovery in the archives, in
contrast, disrupts familiar narratives and requires him to make
sense of what he finds through extensive engagement with and
analysis of new ideas. He reflects that the turmoil he feels by
having his beliefs disrupted "is the very price we pay for
transforming our knowledge into wonder" (30). By naming
Apelles's revelations "discoveries," Treuer ironically reverses
colonial usages of "discovery" that proceed from the
assumption of European superiority and inscribe Native
peoples into narratives of inferiority, savagery, and Manifest
Destiny (Vizenor, Preface {44} vii). Instead, for Apelles,
discovery entails wonder and transformation; he now faces the
hard work of interpreting and analyzing knowledge that
contests, rather than confirms, what he already knows in a
reciprocal process closely related to the mechanics of love and
translation. As Apelles explains, "It is one thing to translate a
thing, and something else completely to have that thing read. It
is one thing to love someone, and something else entirely to be
loved in return" (27). If reading to confirm what one already
knows involves taking evidence, the engaged analysis Treuer
advocates is marked by wonder, transformation, and reciprocity.
Despite Treuer's efforts to encourage analysis instead of
reliance on familiar narratives, critical attention to Translation
focuses on the relative authenticity of the novel's two
narratives. David Yost offers important correctives to the
book's early reviewers, many of whom read the paired
narratives as parallel or miss Treuer's critique of the essentialist
assumptions undergirding the pastoral. He argues, "the story of
Bimaadiz and Eta is not, as some reviewers have suggested, a
simple parallel to the story of Apelles and Campaspe. . . .
Rather, the pastoral romance acts as an obstacle to the love of
Apelles and Campaspe, its stereotypes threatening Apelles's
ability for self-definition. For all the charms of its story--or
perhaps because of them--this fairy-tale simulation of Indian
life becomes the true villain of the novel" (69). Yost suggests
that the pastoral is a projection of Euro-American fantasies as
cultivated and made familiar by canonical American texts. For
example, he compares a scene in which a jealous suitor
disguises himself as a bear in an attempt to rape Eta--an effort
so successful even Eta's dogs are fooled--to a scene in James
Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans in which
Hawkeye and Uncas, disguised as bears, "walk unrevealed
through a hostile band of Hurons" (64). Looking to the familiar
tropes the pastoral adopts, Yost concludes, "By putting this
Cooper-esque story--and implicitly, the destructive stereotypes
authors like Cooper helped to shape--in conversation with the
more realistic narrative of Dr. Apelles, the novel again suggests
that these stories have nothing to do with the lived experiences
of Anishinaabe individuals and everything to do with
Euroamerican fantasies of Indians" (64). Like most reviewers,
however, Yost reads Translation as an ultimately affirming
novel that celebrates self-discovery and transcendence.8 He
concludes that Apelles works through the confining stories that
shape audiences' understandings of Natives, and by the end of
the novel "Apelles has learned to translate {45} himself
and
found a 'much better,' more genuine love, winning his most
important victory" (71-72). Because he has negotiated and
transcended the various literary traditions that proscribe how
people around him interpret his Nativeness, Yost concludes,
Apelles is able to offer a "more realistic," "more genuine,"
"more accurate self-reflection" (64, 71).
The final scenes of the novel, however, displace realism,
authenticity, and accuracy as narrative aims by emphatically
underscoring the novel's fictionality. Campaspe confronts
Apelles about his omniscience and her own fictionality as a
character in his translation:

you didn't really find anything in the archive, did you?

I found myself, he says with a twinkle in his eye.

but where's the original, then? what is the original?

you should know that by now.

this all feels make-believe, she says after a while. even
my heart--it feels like make-believe. but it isn't. is it? my
heart is filled with something. so there is something to it
after all, something you can weigh and measure. it is real.
but everyone is going to think you made all this up. I
can't believe it's actually happening. (312)

Apelles confirms her suspicions: "it is happening, he says, his
eyes wild. it is happening and what's wrong with
make-believe? isn't that how it works: we make belief? besides,
happiness is more real than any illusion" (312). Apelles clearly
separates his story from conventional understandings of
authenticity, which require belief in and fidelity to an essential
identity. Rather, as in the Translator's Note that characterizes
the novel as a "gift of beauty," Apelles underscores his story's
aesthetic nature. He reminds readers that the novel is a fictional
creation rather than the exposé of self-discovery it first seems;
Apelles is performing, rather than divulging, intimate insights
into what it means to be Native. In other words, Apelles refuses
to play the role of native informant for his audience. Contrary
to critics' impressions, Apelles shows he is capable of
dissimulation and that he is not tied to or responsible for
authenticity or realism.
Campaspe's discovery of Apelles's--and her
own--fictionality directly repudiates her first impressions of her
lover: "She had been attracted to him from the start. His silence
was beautiful to her because, {46} although he said little,
it
was clear that he was not capable of dissimulation--he could
not appear as anything other than what he was. He could not
be, or seem to be, anything other than Apelles" (143). Even
once Campaspe becomes intimate with Apelles, she thinks of
him "complete unto himself . . . like some kind of animal--a
badger or a woodchuck or a beaver--who needs nothing else,
who need not do anything in particular at all for us to recognize
him, instantly, for what he is" (144). Like the novel's readers,
Campaspe slowly comes to understand that she is implicated in
Apelles's story. After stealing his manuscript and bringing it
back to her apartment to read, Campaspe realizes his story is
not just a transparent translation of Apelles's culture and
experiences: "She read the page again, more confused than at
first. Her heart quickened and she rubbed her fingers together.
It wasn't what she had expected at all. Not at all. She began
reading quickly, with the sickening dread that she was bound to
find herself in the translation, or a version of herself " (249).
Campaspe's confusion and anticipation of seeing herself in the
text are believable analogs for readers' reactions to Apelles's
unexpected glance upward at the end of the novel, particularly
if we heed the translator's request and turn back to the
beginning of the novel to read it again, this time as a
theorization of how and why we read Native literature.
Campaspe, after all, is both lover and reader of Apelles.
From his twin discoveries in the archive early in the novel,
Apelles pairs loving and reading, reflecting, "I should be able
to make love. I should be able to translate it into a language
that someone, somewhere, will want to read. And he knows,
surely, that the answer to both the translation and to love will
be the same" (39). He acknowledges, however, that love and
translation are both reciprocal actions, in which both
parties--including writers and readers, as well as lovers--share
the labor of translation. Campaspe similarly recognizes the
intimacy of reading when Apelles first piques her interest at
work: "Apelles was a pleasant torture because she longed to lift
his cover and read him, to bring him home and read him
immediately and completely, and, ultimately, to shelve him in
her most private and intimate stacks in her warm, cozy,
red-hued apartment" (144). While Campaspe soon has the
opportunity to lift Apelles's cover as she has imagined, she
finds it difficult to read Apelles in ways other than sex. Apelles
frustrates her efforts to understand who he is and where he
comes from; he remains reluctant to share stories of his past
with her even as their relationship grows more intimate.{47}
Apelles's hesitancy in sharing himself and his past with
Campaspe stems from his mistrust of the desires others place
on his Nativeness. When Campaspe insists on knowing about
his childhood, Apelles compares her demands to those of his
first sexual partner in an anecdote he recalls about a summer in
his youth, a story Apelles understands as a metaphor for the
demands he faces as a Native man. The summer he was twelve
years old, Apelles had a troubled relationship with a young
white girl who had been sexually abused by her father (214).
Frances Warcup--"a white girl, no different from any other,
hungry and lonely and orphaned within herself "--taught
Apelles about sex and was the first to manually pleasure him,
an act they repeated often though it was dissatisfying for both
parties: "Dr. Apelles still thought of that girl all those years
ago. She had clutched his penis so hard and her arm moved
ceaselessly and it must have gotten tired. She must have gotten
tired, but she pursed her lips and tilted her head and kept at it,
not satisfied until the stain came out and still not satisfied even
then" (204, 214). Frances's relationship with Apelles is a
deeply problematic cry for help. Wounded and isolated, she
looks to Apelles's Nativeness as a potential escape from her
desperate present.
Apelles understands the potentially extractive quality of
Frances's desperation as indicative of his future relationships
with all white people; they want something from his
Nativeness to heal something broken inside of themselves.
Their desire for a Native salve, however, relies on the familiar
representations of Natives they already know, not engagement
with Apelles as an individual. Not only is such an arrangement
dissatisfactory--the impressions of indigeneity they seek are the
products of colonialist misrepresentations--it continually
wounds Apelles, who bears the brunt of such uneven
exchanges. Reflecting on his decision to live a lonely life rather
than share his story, Apelles names white people's desires as
the imperative for his privacy:

The white people haunted him just as he haunted his own
past. They excursed into the sanctity of his own self. It
was that way for all Indians. Indians were the past that
everyone else visited as a way to check on the
development of something deep and long dormant.
That girl [Frances]. She was looking for something
after all and tried to call it up, carried on in the wake of
his come: some-{48}thing unique, something different,
something from outside herself that she could control in
herself. She was looking to interrupt the dreary gray flow
of life. She was looking for the one thing. The one thing.
The one thing that could tell her she was unique, that her
life was unlike any other, that she was more than a ghost,
too. It was sad and also very wise.
No wonder he felt the need to protect himself and his
own personal treasure. (214-15)

Drawing on his memory of Frances, Apelles reflects:
"Campaspe's curiosity and dissatisfaction with him and his
explanations of himself and his translation are just like that.
She hopes to get from him something that is unique" (215). He
fears that, like Frances and other white people in his life, she is
looking for uniqueness in his Nativeness as she understands it
through stereotypes of Natives, that she is looking for evidence
for what she already knows. In response, Apelles stakes limits
around his story.
After months of evasion and Campaspe's eventual theft of
Apelles's manuscript, the couple's relationship reaches a happy
resolution when Campaspe accepts Apelles's fictional
translation as a way to know him.9 Unlike Frances, who kept
seeking "that one thing" that she needed for herself, Campaspe
reads Apelles to learn something about him rather than to
confirm what she already believes. Apelles acknowledges, "She
needs the story of his life, but as an Indian he is reluctant to
give up that sovereign part of himself. So when Campaspe
might ask, 'What was it like?' because eventually everyone
wanted to know, he says, 'I don't know'" (204). Instead, Apelles
talks about his translation, which "became the story he told her
of himself, as a substitute for the story of his life. And he tried
not to get anxious if she asked too many questions or probed
too deeply" (206). Apelles's reluctance to share stories about
himself, or even his translation, is more complicated than an
exclusionary impulse. He admits that "[a]ny story, all stories,
suppose a reader. Stories are meant to be heard and are meant
to be read. And translations, no matter what the subject, are
like stories in that regard, only more so" (24). Apelles wants to
be read the same way he wants to be loved, and in both cases
he is dissatisfied until the relationship is reciprocal. As Apelles
predicted, the answers to love and translation were the same;
Campaspe steals Apelles's translation and reads it with wonder,
{49} rather than reading for a familiar narrative. She
explains:
"I was so curious . . . I wanted to know what the words meant,
she says. once I started reading I couldn't stop, she says. and I
was surprised! I had no idea" (309). Their relationship--and the
novel--resolves after Campaspe critically reads Apelles's
manuscript multiple times and realizes her lover is capable of
dissimulation and that she can know him through his
dissimulation--his fiction--instead of searching for something
"original" he could translate for her.
At the end of the novel, Campaspe understands what
Apelles acknowledges: she is a character in a fiction he has
created, and their love exists in narrative form. Just as
Apelles-the-character's fictional translation became "the story
he told her of himself," so too does Apelles-the-narrator's
fictional Translation become the story he tells his readers of his
life. The novel, Treuer emphatically insists, is fiction, a "gift of
beauty" to be engaged as an intellectual and aesthetic creation.
Understanding the characters and the metafictional gymnastics
of the final scenes requires readers to--like Campaspe--engage
with the novel's literary style and aesthetics instead of looking
to confirm familiar narratives of self-realization, romance, and
discovery of Native American worlds.

THE POLITICS
OF AESTHETICS

Treuer embeds Apelles's narrative in Bimaadiz and Eta's
pastoral romance, a story that locates the political potential of
literary dissimulation in a specifically Native historical context.
Replete with stereotypes and canonical tropes about Natives,
the story illustrates the Euro-American fantasies that threaten
to overwrite Apelles's translation. By alternating the two stories
for the length of the novel, Treuer links their projects and
contextualizes them in a longer history of survivance stories by
Native storytellers and translators.
The narrative of Bimaadiz and Eta's love focuses on a year
in their adolescence in which they transition from friendly
playmates to married lovers. As several of the novel's early
reviewers note, the pastoral closely mirrors the Greek story
Daphnis and Chloe. Yost tracks the similarities in detail,
concluding, "[t]hough he infuses the story with fresh language
and detail, Treuer has done little else beyond changing Greek
names to Anishinaabemowin ones and adjusting the setting
accord-{50}ingly" (65). Indeed, the plot sequence and
even
specific scenes can be traced to the Greek myth, from the
youths' early abandonment to their unlikely reunion with their
birth parents in the story's serendipitous conclusion.10 Perhaps
most notably, the fantastic innocence Bimaadiz and Eta display
is directly linked to the "famous innocence of Daphnis and
Chloe--who, despite their careers in animal husbandry, manage
to lack the slightest knowledge of sex--[which] also suggests
the Rousseauan noble savage, a patronizing stereotype long
used to portray the 'Indian' as 'safely dead and historically past'"
(Yost 65, quoting Robert Berkhofer). Treuer's adaptation of
Daphnis and Chloe so successfully adopts the tropes about
Natives made familiar to US audiences by American literature
that many reviewers lauded the pastoral as "lush," "sensuous,"
and "real and affecting," without noting the parodic quality of
the narrative.11 The novel's reception suggests the degree to
which readers read for evidence to affirm social fantasies of
Natives as noble innocents and willing cultural translators.Translation's conspicuous reliance on a classic
European
pastoral nods toward a tradition of native informants
identifying and capitalizing on the blindness that social
fantasies cultivate. Jace Weaver (Cherokee) offers Herbert
Schwarz's Tales from the Smokehouse (1974) as an example of
an informant subverting expectations by explicitly catering to
stereotypes. One of the stories in Schwarz's collection is about
a young Native woman naively seduced by a priest who
capitalizes on her ignorance and sexual innocence, reportedly
related to Schwarz from "the real 'gentle Indian girl' involved in
the incident" (Weaver, "Splitting" 51). Finding the recent
convert lying "naked on the stone floor," a missionary removes
his clothes to lie next to her to share in her suffering (51).
Weaver summarizes the story:

Seeing the man's erection, the young girl inquires, "What
is that pointed stick that stands out from your belly?" His
Pauline response is: "My child . . . this stick is a thorn in
my side, which causes me great pain and misery." The
naïve catechist replies, "It grieves me to see you so.
Although I am cold and hungry, my suffering is but small
compared to yours. . . . I want you to torture me with that
thorn of yours, and put it where it will hurt me most!"
The story then progresses to its obvious, gruesome
conclusion, made all the more disgusting because it
implicitly says that Native women do not know their own
bodies. (51)

{51} The story, as Weaver explains, is the "'put the
devil in
hell' tale" from Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron (51). He
surmises, "I believe that Schwarz's 'informant' was having a bit
of fun at the expense of the amateur ethnographer, a not
uncommon practice (though Italian Renaissance literature is
not normally involved in the jape)" (51). The Native woman
clearly recognized the degree to which the ethnographer
desired evidence of familiar narratives, so she obliged, at his
expense. Daphnis and Chloe serves Treuer's pastoral narrator
much as The Decameron provided source material for
Schwarz's informant: the narrator thinly veils an old European
story as Native by changing the names and setting but keeping
intact the stereotypes through which canonical American
literature renders Natives legible. In other words, the pastoral
offers evidence for what readers already "know" about Natives
through legacies of irresponsible scholarship and representation.
In perhaps less obvious ways, Apelles's narrative can be
read in the same tradition of Native dissimulation. Apelles and
Campaspe, as critics point out, are historical figures from
Alexander the Great's court, and their love story resonates with
the characters' romance in the novel: an artist, Apelles, paints
such a beautiful likeness of Campaspe, one of Alexander's
concubines, that Alexander gifts Campaspe to Apelles in
exchange for the portrait.12 More importantly, Treuer's
Apelles--like the Native woman in Weaver's anecdote--gives
his audience the impression that we have access to his life by
appearing to transparently translate his memories and intimate
experiences for our consumption. Whereas Schwarz's
informant leaves the ironic tension in her story intact, Treuer
tips his hand in the final scenes. In both cases, the storyteller
maintains control over access and rewrites conventional power
relations between native informants and their audiences.
Turning back to the beginning and rereading
Translation
after learning that Apelles fabricated the self he translates for
readers involves reading the novel with an awareness of our
limited access into the characters' lives. Like the young Native
woman in Weaver's anecdote, Apelles declines to provide
readers with transparent insight into his life; he tells a story that
is "meant to be read" but refuses the role of cultural translator
historically demanded of Native individuals (24). By insisting
on the novel's fictionality, Treuer shifts focus from cultural
artifacts to storytelling, from amateur ethnography to literary
study.13 In other words, he {52} asserts
his ability--and
prerogative--to dissimulate and to translate on his own terms.
Indeed, in a novel centered on acts of translation Treuer
conspicuously declines to translate some Ojibwe dialogue. In
an interview Treuer explains his decision to leave some Ojibwe
phrases in his novels untranslated:

[W]e novelists have inherited an ethnographic
impulse--there's an equation in ethnography where you
have the ethnographer and you have the informant, and
novelists have inherited that, so that the world is the
ethnographer, we feel compelled to explain ourselves out
into the world, and why should we? Why shouldn't the
world reach a little closer and push a little harder, dig a
little deeper, towards us? And so that's why I won't
translate. (Kirwan 86)

Treuer privileges authorial--and in this case, specifically
Ojibwe--knowledge by declining to translate private Ojibwe
conversations and thoughts for his audience.14 While Treuer
has on occasion translated phrases from his novels for scholars,
in an interview about his second novel, The Hiawatha (1999),
he explains his reluctance to render a character's thoughts into
English as an allegiance he shares with his character: "Betty's
life is terrible, for the most part. And when she remembers her
early life with her husband it is the one precious and beautiful
and unsullied part of it. So she protects it in her mind from the
rest of her life by remembering it in Ojibwe. To translate it in
the book would be, in a way, to violate Betty's memory" (qtd.
in Kennedy 53-54). He explains further, "of course, Ojibwe
speakers will understand it, but that understanding must be
earned by the reader. The chance to look into Betty's life
completely is a chance that is earned" (54). While untranslated
Ojibwe is less critical to understanding Apelles's stories than
Betty's, Translation similarly underscores the limits of readers'
access to the characters. The final scenes of the novel reveal
that Apelles has declined to translate and tells a "make-believe"
story instead; readers earn the chance to look into characters'
lives by engaging the novel's aesthetics using, as Daniel Heath
Justice (Cherokee) suggests in his review of Treuer's place in
Native literary studies, "our specific skills as literary and
textual interpreters, translators, and, even more generally,
embodied readers" (345). Treuer, like the characters he crafts,
does not exclude {53} readers but insists on reciprocity,
that
we "push a little harder, dig a little deeper" toward Native literature.
Treuer's attention to questions of access and translation
resonate with Lisa Brooks's (Abenaki) frustration with
academic expectations of "native informants." In glossing her
understanding of American Indian literary nationalism, Brooks
makes a similar call for "the world [to] reach a little closer and
push a little harder" toward Native communities and
knowledges, rather than continuing to reinscribe the centrality
of institutional and canonical authority:

[I]t is Native critics who are so often called on to play the
role of translator, who are asked to travel from the village
center to the academic council and explain themselves. In
writing the books that we have . . . I believe that we are
inviting everyone to make their way to the kitchen table,
to come to the gathering place. I am not saying that you
(or we) will always be welcome there, given the weight
of history, or that it will be an easy journey, but I can
promise that there will be some food and good
conversation waiting for those who come willing to
listen, and to reciprocate, in turn. (246)

Brooks does not exclude the "academic council" from
discussion but, like Treuer, she refutes the role of "native
informant" and insists on intellectual reciprocity. Specifically,
Brooks responds to the way in which Native critics who
necessarily understand theory and history "in relation to
assimilation and its coercive, often violent, history" must
defend and explain their positions to their peers who ignore
such contexts (245). In short, she challenges the centrality of
non-Native knowledge in the academy and proposes a more
equal exchange of ideas. The intellectual sovereignty Brooks
calls for is not exclusionary, but reciprocal; she insists on
recognition and equality, an arrangement in which both Natives
and non-Natives share the burden of translation.

CONCLUSION

Translation has not been read in critical conversation with the
work of contemporary Native American literary scholars such
as Brooks in part because Treuer published the novel in the fall
of 2006, the same season he published Native American
Fiction: A User's Manual, a provocative collection of essays on
Native literature. Treuer's thesis in User's Manual{54} is that
"if Native American literature is worth thinking about at all it is
worth thinking about as literature" (195). He instructs readers
to focus on the form or aesthetics of Native fiction rather than
interpreting the content as Native cultural material, and he
rejects identity as a category of understanding to the degree that
he concludes, rather hyperbolically, "Native American fiction
does not exist" (195). Treuer argues that Native literature
should be read for its aesthetic style and literary merit, not
authors' identities, a practice he argues diminishes literature to
inaccurate cultural artifacts.
Many literary scholars working in the field of Native
literature met Treuer's thesis in User's Manual with
resistance.15 For instance, Vizenor dismisses Treuer's argument
by pointing to User's Manual's use of Native iconography and
Treuer's identification as "Ojibwe from the Leech Lake
Reservation in Northern Minnesota" as evidence that Treuer
does not abide by his own argument: "Treuer teases the
absence of native survivance in literature, but apparently he is
not an active proponent of the death of the author. Surely he
would not turn native novelists aside that way, by the
ambiguities of cold print, only to declare as a newcomer his
own presence as a native author" ("Aesthetics" 17). Most
problematic about Treuer's work in User's Manual, however, is
that he does not engage contemporary scholarship on Native
American literature in his critical essays and consequently
caricatures a sophisticated, dynamic scholarly field. In his
collection of essays, Treuer cites only eight works of literary
scholarship on Native literature, all of which he uses sparingly;
three citations are from 1999-2000, and the remaining five date
back to 1989-96. By omitting contemporary scholarship,
Treuer never fully contends with at least a decade's worth of
critical conversations on how audiences might de-privilege the
issues of authenticity and identity that occupied earlier
generations of literary critics. For instance, in Tribal Secrets
(1995), Robert Warrior (Osage) argues that Native literary
studies should move away from "parochial questions of identity
and authenticity . . . to keep such questions from obscuring
more pressing concerns" (xix). Weaver echoes Warrior's
concern in That the People Might Live (1997), naming
preoccupation "with questions of identity and authenticity" as
impediments to Native literary theory (22).16 In a critical
history of the field, Christopher B. Teuton (Cherokee) cites
Weaver and Warrior, along with Vizenor, Greg Sarris, Louis
Owens, and Craig Womack, among others, as building on
earlier critical modes to {55} develop new critical
inquiries
that "began to reshape the field" in the 1990s (204). In User's
Manual, Treuer engages reading practices already dramatically
reoriented through a decade of robust and sophisticated critical
conversations in Native American literary studies.
Where User's Manual misses the conversation,
however,
Translation offers a nuanced contribution to contemporary
scholarship on Native literature. The novel illustrates how
privileging literary aesthetics can take seriously the relationship
between literature and Native American communities, an
objective of much recent Native literary scholarship. In having
Apelles refuse the role of native informant, Treuer
contextualizes his critical anxieties about cultural readings of
Native literature in a specific political history that makes
engagement with contemporary literary scholarship possible
and productive. More careful and nuanced than User's Manual,
The Translation of Dr. Apelles illustrates the political potential
of dissimulation by theorizing reciprocal reading practices that
disrupt conventional relationships between readers and texts in
the service of Native intellectualism and survivance.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to James H. Cox, Andrew Uzendoski, and Emily
Lederman for their generous and thoughtful feedback.

NOTES
1. David Treuer's critical projects in
Translation might be understood as
resonant with Robert Warrior's work on Native intellectualism begun in Tribal
Secrets: Recovering Native American Indian Intellectual Traditions (1995).
2. The novel provides some textual evidence for this date
(76), but as
Treuer points out in his interview with Virginia Kennedy, many stereotyped
stories about Natives exist outside of time (51). The same might be said of the pastoral.
3. For a more complete consideration of this history, see, for
example, Linda
Tuhiwai Smith; Thomas King; Vine Deloria Jr.
4. Audra Simpson theorizes an ethnography of refusal that
recognizes a
dissonance between "the anthropologies of timeless procedural 'tradition' that
form the bulk of knowledge on the Iroquois" and the articulations of "the living
(and their nationhood)" so that she might "take up refusal in generative ways"
(71, 78).
5. Warrior's work on Native intellectualism similarly works
against "a very
old tradition of racism toward Indians and other colonized people--we are the
sort of people who are good with their hands, clever in their crafts, nimble on
their feet, and delightful in their imaginations, but not so strong on the heavy
lifting of philosophy and other higher order tasks of the mind" ("Native" 196).{56}
6. Various reviewers identify the authorial voices Treuer
mimics; see
Douglas Robinson; Donna Seaman; and Emily Carter Roiphe, as well as David Yost.
7. Dr. Spencer Cox in Sherman Alexie's short story "Dear
John Wayne"
exemplifies the prototypical anthropologist Deloria indicts and Treuer invokes.
8. For example, one review lauds the novel's "literary satire,
metafictional
games-manship and cultural truthtelling," while another concludes "Treuer's
edgy romance celebrates our love for each other, love for the earth and love of
story" (Roiphe; Seaman).
9. As they discuss the lost manuscript in the penultimate
scene of the novel,
Campaspe reveals that the story she read is fiction: "I don't even own a white
sweater, she says," referring to a key part of her wardrobe in the story (311).
The couple jokes about Apelles's narrative power, and Campaspe thanks him
for the white sweater and asks, "can I have a red one, too?," a request Apelles
grants (312). Notably, Campaspe does have a white sweater in the story to
which readers have access; the same scene that sees the relationship reach a
happy resolution, therefore, also shows the romance to be fiction.
10. See William K. Freiert, a classicist who outlines Treuer's
use of Daphnis
and Chloe, as well as the story of Apelles, in detail.
11. See, for example, Roiphe; Seaman.
12. John Lyly's Campaspe (1584) reprises an
account of the story first
recorded by Pliny. For more complete consideration of Apelles's and
Campaspe's relationship to the historical figures, see Freiert; Robinson; Yost.
13. Currently on the literature and creative writing faculty at
the University
of Southern California, Treuer earned his PhD in anthropology.
14. Most Ojibwe phrases in the pastoral can be understood
through context.
In Apelles's narrative, however, such is not the case. When a character in the
story translates Ojibwe dialogue into English, the meaning changes
dramatically (Yost 63).
15. For a more considered contextualization of the reception
of User's
Manual, see Daniel Heath Justice; James H. Cox; Karl Kroeber; Arnold
Krupat; Lisa Tatonetti; Scott Richard Lyons, "Battle"; Christopher Taylor.
16. Lyons maps the move away from ethnographic, cultural
literary
criticism over the past several decades ("Actually" 294-95). Christopher B.
Teuton similarly tracks modes of critical inquiry in Native literary studies over
the past forty years (200-209).

WORKS CITED

Alexie, Sherman. "Dear John Wayne." The Toughest Indian in the
World. New
York: Grove Press, 2000. 189-208. Print.

Yost, David. "Apelles's War: Transcending Stereotypes of American
Indigenous People in David Treuer's The Translation of Dr. Apelles."
Studies
in American Indian Literatures 22.2 (2010): 59-74. Print.

{59}

The Wedding of Pocahontas and John
Rolfe
How to Keep the Thrill Alive after Four Hundred Years of
Marriage

DREW
LOPENZINA

Here you come again,
asking. Do you see
we have nothing
to give, we have given
like the ground, our
mountains rubbed bare
by hybrid black poisons
concocted from tobacco.
--Karenne Wood,
"Jamestown"

And how many times did I pluck you
From certain death in the wilderness--
--Paula Gunn Allen, "Pocahontas to Her
English Husband, John Rolfe"

On the 5th of April 2014, on what could only be described as a
picture perfect spring day, an eager congregation gathered
alongside the banks of the James River outside Williamsburg,
Virginia, to witness a reenactment of what is, perhaps, the most
storied ceremony of the colonial era in North America--the
wedding of Pocahontas and John Rolfe. The event, part of "The
World of Pocahontas" forum hosted by Historic Jamestowne,
was held outdoors on the site of the former James Fort chapel
where Rolfe and Pocahontas may or may not have actually
been joined in holy matrimony four hundred years ago in 1614.
It was a day resplendent in the anachronistic pairings of
costume pantaloons and Disney backpacks, face paint and
suntan lotion, period music and iPod earplugs, historians and
tourists, and the elements seemed to smile approvingly on it all,
with the April sun shining bright and the gentle {60}
lapping of
the river upon its banks sounding like a muffled drum beat
beneath the general milling of the crowd.
The event was billed as a "commemoration" of the four
hundredth anniversary of the wedding and offered, apart from
the ceremony itself, a walking tour of Jamestown, opportunities
to meet and talk with members of the cast, a "photo
opportunity" with the wedding party, and a "World of
Pocahontas" activity and coloring book for the young ones. As
a professor of early American and Native American literature
at a nearby university, I was at once irresistibly drawn to this
entertainment and made to feel terribly uneasy by the
cultural-historical claims it apparently forwarded--its
positioning of Pocahontas within a space and site so
circumscribed by colonial power, both past and present. I
couldn't help but wonder whose story was truly being
forwarded and to what extent the "world" of Pocahontas and
her people could be called forth in such a setting.
It is tempting, of course, when speaking of this event, to say
"the wedding of Pocahontas and John Smith" as the two names
are so inextricably intertwined in the mytho-historical mire of
American memory. In fact, Smith's statue, erected by the river's
edge but still within the delineated parameters of the old fort,
loomed large over the proceedings. Prior to the ceremony
couples posed for snapshots at Smith's bronzed feet and
children playfully scrambled around the statue's base. It was
Smith, of course, who catapulted the young daughter of the
Powhatan Confederacy into cultural immortality when he
forged his romantic tale of rescue at the hands of the beautiful
young "Indian princess" in his 1624 General Historie of
Virginia and the Summer Isles. Smith, the colonial adventurer
par excellence, had been unable to attract new investors for a
return trip to America and so, in order to rough out a living
back in London, had turned to writing thrilling romances of his
former adventures instead. In his General Historie he
elaborated greatly on previous accounts and drew from other
popular European writings and folktales to construct a protean
narrative of colonial conquest in which he reserved for himself
the role of irrepressible hero. In the story, known to most all
English-speaking peoples, Smith understood he was being led
to his execution before the great Powhatan "emperor." He was
only spared this ignominious fate when the "King's dearest
daughter," Pocahontas, hopelessly smitten by the figure of
Smith, could not bear to see him killed and so {61} threw
herself over him in an impulsive gesture that has come to
embody resilient notions of white exceptionalism ever since
(Smith 321).

Fig. 1. Pocahontas and John Rolfe on stage at Historic Jamestowne, 5
April
2014. Photo by author.

In fact, if we're being perfectly honest, it is this ceremony, and
not the wedding in question, that remains the most storied of
America's colonial past, sprouting countless dramatic and
fictional repetitions over the next four hundred years, of which
Disney's version is merely the current favorite.1 Like the statue
of John Smith at Jamestown, Disney has cast its long shadow
over the tale, embosoming generations of Americans in its
seductive, politically correct, "love conquers all" ending that
gently backpedals audiences away from the much more
difficult narrative of colonial violence, coercion, and ultimately
genocide that radiates yet from its silences.
Contemporary scholars from Karen Ordahl Kupperman to
Camilla Townsend to Paula Gunn Allen have offered differing
interpretations of what might actually have taken place in
Smith's famous encounter.2 The most compelling of these
interpretations was that Smith was being made a participant in
an adoption ceremony of sorts, in which Powhatan (a {62}
traditional title bestowed upon the leader of the Powhatan
Confederacy) sought to enlist Smith in a network of kinship
diplomacy by which to safeguard and perhaps expand his own
influence. In this interpretation, Smith's life was never actually
in danger. Powhatan apparently deemed it wiser to attempt to
incorporate the newly arrived settlers than engage in uncertain
conflict with them. Smith may have only partially understood
the role he was being assigned or the title of Werowance (a
kind of regional leader within the larger framework of
Powhatan influence) being bestowed upon him. Either way, the
English were not inclined to view themselves in a subsidiary
relationship to the reigning Indigenous powers. Theirs was a
mission of possession and conquest. But Smith's own account
suggests at least some knowledge of Powhatan's intentions,
when he observes in the wake of the ceremony that Powhatan
offered him land on what is now Virginia's eastern shore and
from then on vowed to "esteeme him as his son Nantaquoud"
(Smith 322).
The idea that Pocahontas would have been present in the
famed ceremony Smith narrated is doubted by contemporary
Mattaponi and Pamunkey historians who are the keepers of that
oral tradition.3 Their reasonable argument is that Pocahontas, a
child of about ten years of age at the time, would not have been
involved in such high-level affairs of state and certainly would
not have dared to interfere. If she was there, her role would
most likely have been an orchestrated complement to the
proceedings rather than a deviation from them. But the
unlikelihood of her participation is bolstered by the fact that
Smith himself makes no mention of such happenings in his
earliest 1608 version of his captivity entitled "A True
Relation." Pocahontas only emerges in her quasi-heroic role
many years later, after she had traveled to England and become
something of a celebrity in the London courts. Smith
apparently banked upon Pocahontas's fame to generate interest
in his accounts. In other words, there is the strong possibility
that this most generative of American origin stories never took
place as related. To embrace such an understanding, however,
would detract from the enduring cultural value of the tale in
which Pocahontas spontaneously acts out her recognition of
Smith's superior European attributes alongside her devaluation
of her own culture. As the good people at Disney put it, Smith
is supposed to represent something new, exciting and infinitely
more appealing, lurking "just around the river bend."
If we are all familiar with Smith's enhanced version of the
story, the {63} knowledge that the promised romance
between
Smith and Pocahontas was never actually consummated is
largely reserved for a few students of history and those of us
who have accidentally stumbled upon Disney's less popular
Pocahontas 2: Journey to a New World. Smith was injured in
1609 in a mysterious gunpowder accident and was forced to
return to England. Pocahontas, in Smith's absence, apparently
found herself attracted to yet another white stranger, the
"honest and discreete English Gentlemen, Master Rolfe"
(Hamor 1163). If we continue to take the story at face value, as
a colonial romance, we are given to understand that Rolfe,
secretary to the colony and a loyal vassal to the colonial
governor, Sir Thomas Dale, found himself "enthralled" and
"intangled" in thoughts of "an unbelieving creature, namely
Pokahuntas," and dutifully sought out the advice and consent of
his superiors in this matter (Hamor 1164).
Rolfe was acutely aware of the then unwritten prohibitions
against marrying outside one's racial caste in
seventeenth-century England. In his appeal to Governor Dale,
he openly wrestled with his conflicting emotions, making "a
mightie warre in my meditations," and wondered what strange
forces had provoked him to be "in love with one whose
education hath bin rude, her manners barbarous, her generation
accursed, and so discrepant from all nurtriture from my selfe"
(Hamor 1165). If this is hardly the kind of language that
typically knocks a girl off her feet, it resonated strongly with
colonial auditors who would have been concerned not only
with the interracial aspects of the proposed marriage but also
the fact that Pocahontas was not a Christian. Rolfe studiously
made his case, however, noting that his motives were not
founded in base emotions as many might suspect but, in fact,
were driven by his sense of duty to God and his superiors, in
addition to "our Countrey's good, the benefit of the plantation,
and for the converting of one unregenerate, to regeneration;
which I beseech God to graunt, for his deere Sonne Christ
Jesus his sake" (Hamor 1167). Rolfe was pulling out all the
stops and, in essence, promised to make Pocahontas the first
true Christian convert of the English colonies.
Disney, perhaps wisely, leaves out the part about Christian
conversion in their retelling of the narrative. In our current
cultural environment, such an element feels too openly
coercive and gets in the way of an otherwise good love story.
Lest we doubt the central importance of Christian conversion
to the overall narrative, however, it is helpful to {64}
remember that John Gadsby Chapman's lavish 1840 portrait of
Pocahontas's baptism still hangs in the rotunda of the Capitol
building in Washington DC, thus making it a vital component in
the panorama of American power there on display. Early
theatrical reproductions of Smith's story, too, placed
Pocahontas's conversion at the center of the tale.

Fig. 2. John Gadsby Chapman, The Baptism of
Pocahontas, 1840. Oil on
canvas, 12 × 18 ft. Courtesy of The Architects of the Capital.

Of course, there are other things that Disney left out. For
instance, familiar as the story is, most of us are surprised to
discover that Pocahontas, far from freely offering herself up in
matrimony to Rolfe, was a prisoner of the English when she
"consented" to the union. Ralph Hamor describes in a 1614
letter to his colonial supervisors how that "everworthy
gentleman," Captain Argall, in what amounts to an undisguised
act of treachery and deceit, lured Pocahontas aboard his ship,
"that in ransome of hir, he might redeeme some of our English
men and armes, now in the possession of her Father." Captain
Argall, who would eventually become governor of the colony
himself, is depicted as one who had earned the respect and trust
of the local Natives. These simple savages, to use the parlance
of the times, apparently loved Argall so dearly they would trip
over themselves in trying to find new ways to "doe him some
acceptable good turne, which might not only plea-{65}sure
him, but even be profitable to our whole Colonie" (Hamor
1120-1121). Apparently such "good turnes" included helping
Argall kidnap the daughter of their principal chief.
The attempt to justify Argall's actions and redirect fault
back to the Natives is unpersuasive, even if scholars have
traditionally failed to interrogate it too deeply. One thing
Hamor leaves out in his explication of these transactions is that
the English men in Powhatan's custody had not, in fact, been
captured by the local Natives, as readers might presume, but
had actually fled to them, seeking to escape what they saw as
cruel bondage to their colonial overlords. In which case
Argall's forceful abduction of Pocahontas, a seventeen-year-old
girl at this time, cannot even be properly understood as
"payback" or "tit for tat." Nor are his actions in anyway
consistent with the carefully cultivated relationship of "love
and peace" he is said to have nurtured with the Natives. Adding
insult to injury, even though the ransom was promptly paid by
Powhatan, the English determined that they were better off
keeping both the ransom and the "Emperor's" daughter, and so
they declined to release her. She remained in colonial custody
for a full year, which only ended in her marriage to Rolfe.
These are the uncomfortable facts surrounding the
"romance" of Pocahontas and John Rolfe, and they form the
materials from which Historic Jamestowne crafted its theatrical
reenactment. Historic Jamestowne is jointly operated by the
National Park Service and the Association for the Preservation
of Virginia Antiquities. According to their own promotional
literature, their mission is "to preserve, protect and promote the
original site of the first permanent English settlement in North
America and to tell the story of the role of the three cultures,
European, North American and African, that came together to
lay the foundation for a uniquely American form of democratic
government, language, free enterprise and society" ("Historic
Jamestowne"). As with Disney's Pocahontas, this narrative is
at once culturally inclusive and yet not so subtly oriented
toward a perspective still deeply rooted in the privileging of
colonial institutions and practices. The mission statement
posits the formation of a participatory process in which three
cultures seamlessly unite to form one government, one
language, one society, the overall benign value of which none
should question. Repressed in Historic Jamestowne's
innocuous language of inclusion are vital questions {66}
of
tribal sovereignty, termination, language loss, removal, and
other acts of colonial violence too great to enumerate.

Gerald Vizenor has described this type of narrative as a
"literature of dominance" that "maintains the scientific models
and tragic simulations of a consumer culture" (67). Although a
performance such as the wedding of Pocahontas and John
Rolfe may be propped up with all the technical apparatus of
modern history making, bestowing upon it a sheen of accuracy
and integrity, it takes for granted that history itself, the colonial
writings by which such events are passed down to us over time,
is somehow an impartial process or renders for us the only
world we are capable of knowing. Vizenor questions the
authenticity of such archival accounts, probing the colonial
agendas that reside within inscribed narratives of exploration
and discovery, finding instead simulations and shadows that
have successfully distracted us from the lives and learnings of
the Indigenous communities they seek to neutralize and
contain. {67} Pocahontas does not appear before us here
as a
figure cut whole from the cloth of history, but rather as a
"bankable simulation" constructed to appease dueling forces of
academic and consumer culture (11).
As Linda Tuhiwai Smith reminds us, it is dangerous to
simply accept that history as a discipline is innocent, that facts
merely "speak for themselves and that the historian simply
researches the facts and puts them together . . . to tell their own
story, without any need of theoretical explanation or
interpretation" (32). The English settlers who colonized
Jamestown at the start of the seventeenth century took a
decidedly dim view of Native culture. Their accounts not only
project their misrepresentations and prejudices into the future,
but they willfully rationalize the aims and practices of
colonization, predictably placing the blame for eruptions of
violence and aggression at the feet of the "savages" who, if the
colonial record is to be believed, knew nothing of civility,
piety, culture or law. In the estimation of many Indigenous
scholars, what these historical accounts offer, the simulations
they disseminate, do not represent Native lives and cultures so
much as produce their absence.
One might argue in response that Historic Jamestowne's
mission statement deliberately attempts to accentuate the
positive by locating a narrative of mutual cross-cultural value.
The event was subtitled "The Promise of Peace," and as the
promotional literature states, the 1614 wedding brought about
"a new period of optimism and cooperation . . . between two
peoples caught within the emerging 17th-century Atlantic
world" (Historic Jamestown). By soliciting the participation of
local Native communities in its activities, the curators worked
to bring Native lives and histories to the center of the story.
The Pamunkey Indian Museum and Cultural Center was
consulted in staging the event, as was the Patawomeck
Heritage Foundation. There can be little doubt that, in restaging
the four-hundred-year-old wedding, Pocahontas is not only the
central figure, but she is what draws the crowds. It is her image
and not one of Rolfe that adorns the promotional brochures.
She, and not Smith or Rolfe, is the eponymous heroine of the
beloved Disney movie and countless earlier productions. And,
what's more, the role of Pocahontas on this important
four-hundredth-year anniversary was played by Wendy Taylor,
a young Pamunkey woman, meaning that the role had been
restored to some extent to its tribal origins rather than being
doled out to an actress from another Indigenous community or,
worse yet, to a white actress dressed up to look the part of
Indian. These efforts might {68}] be seen as genuine
attempts
to restore balance to the presentation of this story, and it
appeared as though the crowd of tourists and much of the press
was pleased to take it that way. Still, I am reminded of Tuhiwai
Smith's acknowledgment that "under colonialism indigenous
peoples have struggled against a western view of history and
yet been complicit with that view" (34).
All of these factors contributed to the complex nature of this
production--a dizzying mix of history, myth, and consumer
culture. A large portion of the crowd consisted of parents who
had brought their young children to see the "real" Disney
princess get married. The fact that maybe some of these
children were being presented something of a "correction" to
Disney's current hegemonic control over the tale had to be
considered a kind of positive, did it not? And who wants to
play the role of Professor Buzzkill by informing young children
that what they were witnessing was still very much wrapped up
in a cultural labyrinth of dominant discursive norms? One
young girl in my presence removed a slip of rolled parchment
paper from her Pocahontas backpack and demonstrated how
she was able to trace in crayon her family's roots going all the
way back to Pocahontas and Rolfe, both of whom could be
found pictured like smiling colonial wedding cake figurines at
the base of this genealogical tree. What little girl wouldn't want
to be able to think of herself as a Disney princess, and how few
opportunities there are given that not many Disney princesses
have an actual historical pedigree? Whether this was all
innocent childhood fantasy or represented something more dark
and disturbing--the perpetuation, perhaps, of a deeply rooted
colonial violence--was in many ways severely complicated by
the very visual participation of tribal communities in the
production. In fact, it must be noted, a handful of Native people
were in the audience, mingling with the day-trippers bussed in
from nearby Colonial Williamsburg, TV camera crews, and
members of the press, alongside the smattering of historians,
anthropologists, and other academics. We had all been drawn
to the spectacle, wondering what to make of it and caught up,
consciously or not, in its dazzling contradictions.
Right on schedule, the actors entered in groups of two or
three, gliding through the crowd by way of a roped off
passageway over the lawn and into the site of the chapel. Each
group had a speaking role to perform as they made their way
through the makeshift aisle and onto the stage, wearing head
microphones so they might be heard over the {69} crowd.
The
actors playing Captain Brewster and Sergeant DeRose were
made to sound out some real-politic concerns about the
marriage and its diplomatic potential, with Brewster cheerfully
acknowledging that he never dreamed Pocahontas would agree
to linger with the English, no less marry one of them. Captain
Argall's character freely admits to having taken Pocahontas
captive, but intimates her kind treatment at the hands of the
English. When asked if the wedding might be considered a
"forced union," he laughs, insisting that Pocahontas simply
chose to stay with "the Englishman who loved her." Martha
Sizemore, one of the few women settlers at Jamestown who, in
the play at least, was cast as Pocahontas's attendant during
captivity, served the role of "gossip" and could claim that
Pocahontas had "the heart of an English woman." When asked
if she believed it a good thing to have the heathen and English
brought together in holy matrimony, she tells how Pocahontas,
herself, desired the union once she learned that her father
preferred a copper kettle and a few old swords to his "beloved
daughter." In fact, it is repeated throughout the ceremony that
Pocahontas freely chose to remain with the English "who loved
her" rather than return to her own people. But if there were
further doubts, Martha Sizemore bids us to just look at the
young couple, as though the story of their love were fully
inscribed there upon their countenances. In each case one could
appreciate, perhaps, the historical accuracy of the portrayals, as
well as the occasional nods to tribal sensitivity. Opahisco, who
history tells us was sent by Powhatan to "give Pocahontas
away," entered along with two young men as escorts, all of
them dressed in traditional regalia and face paint. Opahisco
was an uncle of Pocahontas's, and the two young men were
thought to be brothers. Opahisco spoke toward the obligations
of the Powhatan Nation and the hope of renewed diplomatic
relations to be brought about by the union. He concludes that
the marriage is "the proper course for our family."
Last to enter, of course, was Pocahontas herself. Unlike the
other members of the cast, Wendy Taylor, who played
Pocahontas, had no formal acting experience and seems to have
been chosen not only for her tribal affiliation but also for the
extent to which she approximated the impossible physical
requirements of the role as defined by the Disney movie. But as
she followed the theatrical procession to the stage, she held
herself with poise, perhaps feeling as out of place and strangely
the object of attention as the real Pocahontas had four hundred
years earlier. Taylor's presence as {70} she mounted the
stage
was at once captivating and elusive, as though, like the
chimerical nature of Pocahontas herself, she was both present
and not present, the stuff of literature or a bit of colonial
theater, staring down at the crowd from the height of the stage,
unsmiling, the embodiment of an unresolved tension that the
play's ameliorative gestures, its promises of peace, could not
possibly reconcile. Unlike her fellow countrymen on the stage,
she was clothed in English attire, Pocahontas having already at
this time been converted, baptized, and christened as Rebecca,
a name with biblical implications suggesting the coming
together of two nations. Also, unlike the other major players in
the production, Taylor had no speaking part to perform, which,
perhaps, contributed to the uneasy silence that collected around
her. Or, rather, she had no speaking part until the conclusion of
the ceremony when she voiced the indispensable nuptial refrain
of "I will."
It is hard to explain away Pocahontas's silence in the
production. As with the dominant historical record from which
we compile the materials of the tale, she becomes an object of
fascination and colonial agency, but she is not offered the
opportunity to speak herself. Her thoughts and feelings can
only be intimated through the impressions of the other cast
members whose perspectives are roughhewn from the deep
quarry of biased colonial reporting. Buck Woodard, who was
involved in the creation and organization of this year's
performance and who served as liaison between Historic
Jamestowne and its tribal affiliates, suggested to me the
important thing to remember was that Taylor was the first
Pamunkey tribal member to perform the role at a Jamestown
commemoration since 1907. If she was not given a speaking
part, it was because her acting experience was minimal, and the
historical record does not, in fact, allow us to place words in
Pocahontas's mouth.
Never mind that it, history, did allow the
producers to put
forward a Martha Sizemore who, despite the historical silences
surrounding her, was enabled to voice important judgments as
to the "true romance" between Rolfe and Pocahontas. But
apparently we can turn a blind eye to that. And perhaps we
should also turn a blind eye to the history that does not make it
into the script or get voiced on stage: how Smith and the
Jamestown settlers, unable to feed or supply themselves, took
entire villages hostage, threatening to kill indiscriminately
unless their barges were loaded with corn; how John Rolfe's
professed love for Pocahontas seems to spring not from a
spontaneous outpouring of the heart, {71}

but from a calculated design of colonial power meant to keep
the Powhatan empire in check and for which the loyal vassal,
Rolfe, beforehand admits he had "received no small
encouragement" (Hamor 1166); or how Pocahontas, while in
captivity, was carried inland and made to witness the English
soldiers as they "burned in that verie place some forty houses . .
. and made free boote and pillage," killing five or six Powhatan
men in the process (1124). This was done, Pocahontas
understood, {72} because her father could not afford to
continuously offer up ransoms that the English would in turn
refuse to honor. If she was being used as the trump card by
which her peoples' lives and belongings could be destroyed,
she had recourse to one solution and that solution is echoed in
the lone moment of agency she is allowed to voice on stage.
Pocahontas says, "I will."
It might be useful here to think of Scott Richard Lyons's
definition of an "X-mark." If an X-mark is typically understood
as a treaty signature made by one who has not mastered the tool
of European literacy, Lyons would also like us to imagine it in
a broader sense as "a sign of consent in a context of coercion; it
is the agreement one makes when there seems to be little
choice in the matter. To the extent that little choice isn't quite
the same thing as no choice, it signifies Indian agency" (1).
Lyons goes on to explain that, given the conditions of colonial
containment under which Native literature continues to be
produced, all Native writing might be considered an X-mark.
One thing, however, seems certain. Pocahontas's "I will" is an
X-mark. It is the language placed in her mouth by colonial
domination, and yet it remains her own significant act of
exercised agency, placed in an impossible situation, but still
consciously offering consent in the hope of restoring order to a
world terribly out of balance.
Whatever the coercive circumstances that allowed for that
consent to be offered, dominant history still reads and performs
it as "I will." The main problem with the Jamestown wedding
anniversary commemoration is that it cannot be expected to
reconcile the violent tensions that reside behind Pocahontas's
offered consent. Anyone who viewed the proceedings on April
5, 2014, would have walked away satisfied, perhaps, in their
reaffirmation, rooted in the play's explicit assertions, that
Pocahontas and John Rolfe married for love. Truly, to stage it
any other way would likely alienate or even outrage audiences.
The setting of Historic Jamestowne itself, with its mandate "to
preserve, protect and promote the original site of the first
permanent English settlement in North America," suggests that
it is already hopelessly wedded to one version of history, one
set of outcomes, one single American origin story. The play
must present itself as a romance and a love story, just as it
always has. Although it cloaks itself in the mantle of
archeological and historical sciences, it inevitably bends
toward the highly manufactured simulations of dominance that
replaces violence and coercion with more marketable wares.
If this assessment seems too harsh, one might consider for
just a {73} moment, how the story would look were you
to flip
the terms. When white women were captured by Indians in the
colonial period (either in real life or in literary productions),
there was little question about a positive romantic outcome.
The capture of white women by darkskinned peoples was, and
still is, often characterized as the "fate worse than death." As
Increase Mather asserted in the case of one Mary Rowlandson,
a colonial goodwife captured by the Narragansett during King
Phillip's War in the 1670s, none, save those who have
experienced it, "can imagine what it is to be captivated, and
enslaved to such atheistical, proud, wild, cruel, barbarous,
brutish (in one word) diabolical creatures as these, the worst of
the heathen; nor what difficulties, hardships, hazards, sorrows,
anxieties and perplexities do unavoidably await such a
condition" (321). All this despite the fact that Rowlandson
spent only eleven weeks in captivity and, by her own
admission, was not physically molested or forced into any
conjugal relations. Although nineteenth-century literature
remained fascinated with interracial flirtations and offered
multiple texts that labored to produce circumstances placing
white women and Native men in close proximity to one
another, as Carolyn L. Karcher points out, such plots ultimately
functioned to "exclude interracial marriage as a mode of
reconciling the races" (xxiv). For a white woman to maintain
sexual relations with an Indian was the equivalent of a
renunciation of whiteness, an unspeakable loss of status that
placed strict prohibitions against anyone in such circumstances
from ever returning to the fold. By the same token, the literary
conventions of the day suggest that an Indian woman brought
among white men will immediately recognize the superior
nature of her captors and become hopelessly smitten with little
chance of emotional reciprocity. Like Magawisca, who fulfills
the Pocahontas role in the 1827 novel Hope Leslie, this woman
is fated to be the Tragic Mulatto who sacrifices and then pines
in the shadows for the white man whose heart she cannot
master. In other words, literary and historical tradition properly
recognizes such circumstances as incidences of violence and
coercion should they happen to white people, but when
Indigenous women are treated to such violence, it is seen as an
opportunity to highlight notions of racial superiority under the
guise of unrequited love. Perhaps this is why Rolfe, whatever
his contributions to the colony and his later successes with
supplying a marketable strain of tobacco that proved the
salvation of the settlement, has remained history's cuckold. It is
Smith we remem-{74}ber, the intrepid explorer who,
despite
being the object of attraction, retains his racial orientation at all
costs.
Worth noting is that when Mattaponi people tell this story,
their tradition views it within its proper context of colonial
violence. Pocahontas, having learned that Argall was seeking
her capture, went into hiding. She was already married to one
Kocoum, a warrior within the Powhatan Confederacy, and is
believed to have had a child by him. When Argall finally
managed to find and capture Pocahontas, the Mattaponi claim
he raided Kocoum's village, killing Pocahontas's husband and
her infant son. Mattaponi tradition further claims that
Pocahontas was raped, perhaps repeatedly, while in captivity
and that she was already pregnant when Rolfe agreed to marry
her for "the good of the colony" (Custalow and Daniel "Silver
Star" 47-67). Some of this can be corroborated through
colonial records, and some of it has been carefully preserved
and passed along from one generation to the next by Mattaponi
priests or quiakros (xxiii). Whether or not we choose to accept
this version of the story, it would be disingenuous to simply
ignore it. When Historic Jamestowne offered to commemorate
the wedding anniversary, it agreed, wittingly or not, to
remember together. The term co-memoration implies that
different parties will draw from their collective memory banks,
working toward an inclusive expression of historical recovery.
By ignoring the narrative elements by which the Native groups
involved preserve this story, and by privileging aspects of the
story that are ameliorative to a puerile version of history
keeping that erases the blatant exertion of colonial power and
coercion, the people at Jamestown remain complicit in a long
narrative of settler colonialist violence.
The Pocahontas and John Rolfe wedding ceremony serves
as a reminder that, even with the supposition of good intentions
all around, history is still about power. As Tuhiwai Smith
writes, "history is mostly about power. It is the story of the
powerful and how they became powerful, and then how they
use their power to keep them in positions in which they can
continue to dominate others" (35). Sometimes that use of
power involves murder, treachery, and placing innocent young
women in bondage so that they have no choice but to consent
to a forced union. Sometimes it involves a young girl who
becomes so implicated in a lie that she latches onto its
fabrication on the most intimate level of genealogy, drawn up
in blood and crayon. We will never know for sure what passed
between Pocahontas and John Rolfe. There is always the
possi-{75}

Fig. 5. 1922 statue of Pocahontas in Plains Indian attire at Historic
Jamestowne. Photo by author.

{76} that they overcame the violence surrounding
them and
forged true emotional bonds. Such things can be said to have
happened, even within the complex and destructive forces of
colonization and war. To allow for that possibility is, in a
sense, to grant another kind of agency. But to insist upon that
narrative, to weave it into the mytho-historical fabric of one's
culture at the most fundamental level, to use it to spin cultural
fantasies and prop up the apparatus of continued colonial
subjugation, is a moral lapse that needs to be called out,
revisited, and resisted until the time comes when maybe we can
truly co-memorate these events and thereby restore some
semblance of the balance that Pocahontas hoped for in her "I
will." Therein lies the "promise of peace."

NOTES
1. A good source for a compilation of texts centering on the
Pocahontas
narrative over the last four hundred years is Tilton.
2. Kupperman suggests that the ceremony produced John
Smith's "symbolic
death" and rebirth as an adopted member of the Powhatan Confederacy.
Kupperman doesn't parse Pocahontas's intervention but, nevertheless, assumes
it to be a designed component of the ceremony. Paula Gunn Allen understands
Pocahontas's intervention to be more complex, viewing Pocahontas as one who
was groomed by her nation as a Medicine Woman who is asked to infiltrate
English culture and serve as an informant or spy.
3. See Custalow and Daniel "Silver Star," True Story
of Pocahontas, 20.

WORKS CITED

Custalow, Dr. Linwood "Little Bear," and Angela L. Daniel "Silver
Star." The
True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History. Golden: Fulcrum, 2007.
Print.

------. "Pocahontas to Her English Husband, John Rolfe." Skins
and Bones:
Poems 1979-87. Albuquerque: West End P, 1988. 8-9. Print.

Hamor, Ralph. "A True Discourse of the Present State of Virginia."
Capt. John
Smith: Writings with Other Narratives of Roanoke, Jamestown, and the First
English Settlement of America. Ed. James Horn. New York: Library of
America, 2007. 1115-1168. Print.

Smith, John. "The Generall Historie of Virginia and the Summer Isles."
Capt.
John Smith: Writings with Other Narratives of Roanoke, Jamestown, and the
First English Settlement of America. Ed. James Horn. New York: Library of
America, 2007. 201-670. Print.

Tilton, Robert S. Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American
Narrative.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print.

This is a big book about a big topic. Counting the prefatory
pages, the book is just twenty pages shy of five hundred
small-print pages. The topic is how Native authors rewrite
major misconceptions of Americans and American history.
David L. Moore places special emphasis on concepts that erase
tribal sovereignty (frontier theories) and render Indigenous
peoples marginal (Manifest Destiny), invisible (Vanishing
Americans), or trapped in rigid binary oppositions (civilization
versus savagery). Moore claims that Native authors counter,
undermine, and ridicule these powerful historical and cultural
constructs with provocative articulations of five concepts,
themes, or strategies: sovereignty, community, identity,
authority, and ironic humor. To demonstrate how the Native
authors express these counternarratives, he discusses a wide
range of authors from the eighteenth to the twenty-first
centuries, but he focuses primarily on analyses of the works of
five authors that exemplify the counternarratives he admires:
William Apess, Sarah Winnemucca, D'Arcy McNickle, Leslie
Marmon Silko, and Sherman Alexie.
Moore employs a highly structured and complex
organization to make his case. His introductory chapter opens
with a narrative analogy for the "rewriting of America." Martin
Charger, or Wanatan, was "a mixed-blood, yet traditional,
Lakota" who, with his followers, had been inspired by the
vision of another Lakota to "Do good for people" (1), which
translated into helping their people as well as some white
hostages {79} in the 1860s. Their reward for their efforts:
they
were jailed by white settlers and ridiculed by their people.
Moore doesn't stress their failures; instead he sees their
attitudes and efforts as analogous to the functions of Native
writing: "Charger and his friends were willing to risk their lives
for peaceful dialogue, reconciliation, and mutual
accountability, to affirm the commonality of their Indian bodies
and the white hostages' bodies" (90). Similarly the five writers
Moore emphasizes were willing to risk their reputations and
hostile criticism by opening dialogues that would undermine
the powerful misconceptions enumerated above. The rest of the
introduction defines and analyzes in substantial detail those
dehumanizing colonization concepts by surveying both
secondary and primary sources.
Each of the five chapters that follow the introduction
focuses on one of the five concepts, themes, or strategies,
beginning with sovereignty, which Moore perceives as the
foundation for the other four. Each chapter begins with a
substantial overview of relevant scholarship that typically
features relevant influential critics, for example, sovereignty
(Womack, Warrior, Cook-Lynn), community (Weaver),
identity (Owens, Clifford), authenticity (Ortiz), humor
(Vizenor). Each overview also offers Moore's particular slant
on each theme: sovereignty (sacrifice), community (animism),
identity (change), authenticity (translation), humor (irony and
pluralism). Moore follows each overview analysis with
discussions of all five authors' works in a rotating order that
follows a chronological progression, with the first author as the
featured writer for that theme: sustainability (Apess),
community (Winnemucca), identity (McNickle), authenticity
(Silko), humor (Alexie). A brief concluding chapter expands
upon Moore's discussions of authenticity and sovereignty,
drawing in particular on Philip Deloria's work and on what is
probably the most quoted article in the book, Simon Ortiz's
"Towards a National Indian Literature."
The advantages to the structure of the book are obvious. The
emphasis on the five authors enhances the unity of a
wide-ranging book, and the focus on the five concepts, themes,
or strategies offers readers a substantial review of many of the
most important academic and political issues in Native
American studies during the past forty years. The five authors
featured represent diversities of tribal affiliation, genre, gender,
and historical perspective. The latter is especially important to
Moore: "Each [of the authors] is deeply conversant with the
experiences of {80} Indians across America in their own
and
previous periods, sometimes addressing the future as well"
(16). The focus on these authors in their historical and cultural
contexts in combination with brief references to authors as
early as Samson Occom and as twenty-first-century as LeAnne
Howe helps to give Moore's arguments depth and breadth.
The inclusion of discussions of all five authors in each
chapter reveals aspects of each author that would have been
overlooked had Moore decided to concentrate on just one
author in each chapter. Apess is the prime beneficiary of this
recursiveness. His texts are the featured writings for the
sovereignty chapter; that is certainly no surprise. His Indian
Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts,
Relative to the Marshpee Tribe (1835) is a well-known
advocacy treatise on self-determination and land rights for an
"Indian village" and a criticism of white rule over the Mashpee,
a misrule that Apess associates with disempowerment as well
as the violation of Native women. Moore argues, moreover,
that Apess's Eulogy of King Philip (1836) decentralizes the
"history of heroes" by including a Native leader, an "archenemy
of the Puritans," among the pantheon of American heroes (62).
In the community chapter, Moore makes insightful analyses of
Apess's combinations of nationalistic sovereignty rhetoric and
a Christian rhetoric similar to John Winthrop's Model of
Christian Charity (1630) "knit community" language. Moore's
chapter on identity stresses the adaptability of Indian identities
depending on historical circumstances and a writer's audience.
For Moore, Apess's writings represent "a full spectrum of
agency and identity, from the pitiable sinner of Son of the
Forest to the polemical prophet in Eulogy of King Philip, from
hagiographic historian of The Experiences of Five Christian
Indians to the legal historian of Nullification" (189-90). In the
authenticity chapter, Moore concentrates on Simon Ortiz's
concept of translation-- the use of the dominant language for
Native purposes. In the Apess section, he reminds us of Apess's
use of the Lost Tribes- Indian connection and the obvious fact
that Jesus was "white," as well as Apess's call for non-Natives
to "convert" to an Indian "looking-glass." I was especially
delighted to be introduced to Apess the ironic humorist in
chapter 5. My favorite example was Apess's ironic and
hyperbolic rendition of the Massachusetts governor's response
to the Mashpees' "nonviolent actions to reclaim their woodlot"
(351). Apess imagines the governor calling out "fifty or sixty
thousand militia" to protect the Commonwealth from "a
hundred fighting men and fifteen {81} or twenty rusty
guns.
But it is written, 'One shall chase a thousand, and two shall put
ten thousand to flight.' So there might have been some reason
for persons who believe the Bible to fear us" (qtd. 351- 52).
There are nevertheless some disadvantages to maintaining
the chronological rotation of the first author discussed and
using the same five authors throughout. For example, in the
second chapter, "Community as Animism," Moore does
indicate that whereas the animistic qualities expressed by the
other authors are often subtle, "Silko . . . openly proclaims an
animistic view" (151). But since Winnemucca is the second
chronologically after Apess in this second chapter, her Life
among the Piutes (1883) is featured first, and Silko, again in
chorological order, is second to last. But Moore does
compensate for this problem: when an author is not featured
first but obviously excels in using the strategy under
discussion, he or she gets extended space, as in the case of
Moore's excellent discussion of Silko's animistic communities.
Moore's decision to focus primarily on the same five authors--
despite the unity it provides-- does limit his ability to give
extended discussions to relevant authors, for example,
possibly, Mathews's Talking to the Moon (1945) and Erdrich's
Blue Jays Dance (1995), for human-animal-plant communities
and the works of Thomas King, Alexander Posey, and Will
Rogers for humor (Moore does briefly mention the first two). If
he allowed himself some flexibility, especially in the humor
chapter, he wouldn't have had to strain to find substantial use
of humor in Winnemucca, McNickle, and Silko.
Who should read That Dream Shall Have a
Name?
Everyone in Native American literature studies, and especially
graduate students, in particular those studying for comps. They
will find substantive discussions of five of the most important
nexus of interpretive discussions during the past forty years
(the one obvious omission being transnational discussions);
provocative analyses of five important authors whose
publication dates cover almost two hundred years; an appendix
with concise biographies of the five authors; and an extensive
works cited list. I especially appreciated the thoroughness of
Moore's discussion of scholarship, which includes comments
on work done decades ago as well as recent studies; the
insights offered about specific authors (for instance, the
concise identity interpretations of Silko's Almanac, Ceremony,
and "Storytellers Escape" were excellent), and the invitations to
perceive familiar texts in new ways. Now when I think of
Apess, I will always imagine {82} his delight as he
imagined a
hyperventilating governor calling out thousands of militiamen
to protect the citizenry of Massachusetts from those fifteen or
twenty rusty guns that defended the sovereignty of a woodlot.

Theresa S. Smith. The Island of the Anishnaabeg: Thunderers
and Water Monsters in the Traditional Ojibwe Life-World.
Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2012. ISBN 978-0-8032-3832-9. 236
pp.Carrie Louise Sheffield,
University of Tennessee

Theresa S. Smith's The Island of the Anishnaabeg: Thunderers
and Water Monsters in the Traditional Ojibwe Life-World
provides an in-depth analysis of how the Ojibwe (specifically
those living on Manitoulin Island, Ontario) experience and
interpret what non-Natives would deem as simply natural
phenomena (thunder, storms, raging lakes, etc.). Early on,
Smith points out that this text "acts . . . not as a static set of
rules or systematizing dictator within the Ojibwe life-world,
but as a servant to understanding, a guide for strangers on
Anishnaabe island" (12). The Island of the Anishnaabeg is
rooted in a phenomenological approach that focuses on how
traditional and contemporary Ojibwe experience the world
rather than what Smith (or other non-Native scholars) thinks
about that experience. This foundation is essential to presenting
a study that avoids rewriting religious mythology as fiction or
relegating it to a base, primitive perspective. In moving beyond
Eurocentric sources and focusing closely on the experiences of
Ojibwe informants, traditional and contemporary stories,
Ojibwe language, and even traditional and contemporary art,
Smith's text gracefully avoids both pitfalls and offers a
thorough and engaging examination of the relationship
between the spiritual and physical worlds of the Ojibwe.
At the core of Smith's study is her desire to let the Ojibwe
speak for themselves, a goal that is clearly represented in her
reliance upon multiple consultants (twenty-one total). Her
consultants figure prominently throughout the text as she
incorporates their versions of historical as well as
contemporary stories about the Thunderers and Water Monsters
(both are manitouk, powerful supernatural entities, who
regularly do battle over large bodies of water). The Thunderers
are in constant combat with the Water Monsters (more
specifically Mishebeshu), and these battles are typically
experienced as torrential thunderstorms. Several of {83}
her
informants explain how their lives have been shaped by
traditional stories; likewise, many also recount how their
personal experiences with the manitouk have been formative as
well. For example, one informant shares a story about a time
when he witnessed Mishebeshu swimming in Wikwemikong
Bay and was told by a friend that such an encounter was a
"gift," as it could assist him not only in fishing but also in
traveling safely across dangerous water (96-97).
Throughout The Island of the Anishnaabeg,
the reader is
consistently presented with such examples of how traditional
perspectives, stories, and spirituality have evolved and
continue to be relevant in the modern world. Another example
is her discussion of Dreamer's Rock, a place where, in the past,
Ojibwe youth would "[fast] and [pray] for a dream to learn
their spirit guides" (31). Dreamer's Rock continues to play a
significant role in Ojibwe life and culture as it is still regularly
visited as a sacred place. What is significant for Smith is that
the Ojibwe, who are still connected to traditional beliefs and
story, are also modern people. They don't eschew science in
favor of a religious or spiritual explanation of natural events;
however, their way of interacting with the world is predicated
on a different understanding of it.
Smith's linguistic training is vital to understanding the
spiritual and cultural perspective provided by her informants.
While one may easily translate a single word or two via a
dictionary or even an informant, true understanding of
language comes from the conjunction of a word's meaning, its
cultural use, its traditional significance, and its context within a
given story. For example, in discussing the Thunderers
themselves, she explains the eight different terms that identify
them; they range from "ninamidabines . . . The chief or boss of
the Thunderers" (74) to "beskinekkwam. . . Thunder that's
going to hit" (75). The range of words and phrases used to
explain a concept that most non-Natives see as simply thunder
represents, as Smith writes, "the precision with which they
recorded their experiences with language" (75). This precision,
which Smith applies throughout The Island of the
Anishnaabeg, underscores the status of Ojibwe spirituality as a
complex system of belief that avoids dogmatic ideology and
continues to play a role in today's world.
The role of the Thunderers and Water Monsters in the
Ojibwe life-world is evident in the pieces of art Smith uses to
advance her analysis. Art illuminates the depth and intricacy of
what would otherwise be seen as basic binary relationships. For
example, she points out that for many {84} non-Native
people,
the relationship between the Thunderers and the Water
Monsters can simply be seen as one of good versus evil.
However, in analyzing Carl Ray's painting Conflict between
Good and Evil (a title that plays off of the expectation of a
simplified binary), Smith points out that such a binary is
insufficient to understand the image as well as the larger,
cultural perception of the manitouk. The painting, which
presents the Thunderers and Water Monsters in bold, swirling
lines that draw the viewer's eye in an unending cycle between
both images, shows "how the text of the mythic relationship is
read first in the artist's image and at another level in the natural
phenomena which the image recalls [a thunderstorm over the
water]. The manitouk not only speak to each other but mirror
one another in their conflict" (131). Indeed, as Smith earlier
writes: "Standards of good and evil are better understood here
as standards of balance and imbalance, control and chaos"
(106). It is through such balance, she implies, that the Ojibwe
can maintain bimaadiziwin, or a life lived well (24).
The primacy of Ojibwe interpretations of natural events is
further reinforced in Smith's treatment of non-Ojibwe sources.
This well-researched text draws upon a wide variety of sources
including historical accounts of interactions between Ojibwe
and early traders and missionaries as well as academic
scholarship written about the Ojibwe over the past century. The
historical resources Smith includes provide a vital sense of how
non-Ojibwe interpreted Ojibwe spirituality and religion, and in
some cases the academic sources she includes provide useful
commentaries on Ojibwe life and belief over time. More
specifically, the text as a whole is shaped around a
phenomenological framework. However, this theoretical
approach is not directed by Western ideology. Rather,
phenomenology enables her to focus her analysis on an Ojibwe
understanding of the world rather than an external, academic one.
Yet Smith deftly avoids presenting academic sources as
academic truth. In many cases, she draws out their flaws,
highlighting what previous scholars have missed,
misinterpreted, or simply misrepresented. For example, Smith
argues against a recent scholar, Christopher Vecsey, who
defines Ojibwe religious experiences as "analogous, if not
identical, to pre-contact religious patterns" (27); this position,
Smith writes, presents "religion as a static entity" rather than as
a constantly evolving, modern way of interacting with the
world (27). Likewise, she identifies flaws within historical
documents and points out that early academics, {85} who
lacked sufficient linguistic and cultural knowledge to
understand traditional stories, often ascribed complex figures
(such as Mishebeshu, who is repeatedly represented as a great
underwater cat) as being foreign in origin (99).The Island of the Anishnaabeg smoothly
navigates the
intricate relationship between the Ojibwe and the spiritual
world. Smith deconstructs the larger belief system into their
discrete, lucid components and then reassembles them to
demonstrate how they interrelate and, ultimately, work in
perfect balance with each other. Exceptionally well written and
researched, The Island of the Anishnaabeg has clear
interdisciplinary value as it not only speaks to religious studies
scholars but also to those within the fields of Native American
literatures, Native American language studies, and Native
American art.

Robin Jarvis Brownlie and Valerie J. Korinek, eds. Finding a
Way to the Heart: Feminist Writings on Aboriginal and
Women's History in Canada. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P,
2012. ISBN 978-0-88755-732-3. 269 pp. Jenna Hunnef, University of
Toronto

Emerging from the conversation begun during a round table
session organized for the 2007 meeting of the Canadian
Historical Association to commemorate Sylvia Van Kirk's
scholarship, Finding a Way to the Heart: Feminist Writings on
Aboriginal and Women's History in Canada exceeds the
expectations of a traditional festschrift. Designed as a means of
showcasing the influence of Van Kirk and her generation of
feminist scholars on the last three decades of feminist historical
writing in Canada, the collection avoids becoming an unbridled
celebration of hers and others' work. Adele Perry's
thought-provoking contribution to the collection comments
upon the simultaneously ambivalent and inspiring interventions
that Van Kirk's enormously influential Many Tender Ties:
Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870 (1980) made into
women's, Aboriginal, and fur trade history in Canada.
Emerging from "the possibilities as well as the risks" inherent
in this kind of historiography, Perry suggests, is "the power of
new analytics to reframe old questions" (83, 84). These "new
analytics" are present in every essay in this collection, which
suggests that this approach is perhaps Van Kirk's single most
influential contribution to the development of the fields of
{86} women's and Aboriginal peoples' history in Canada
in the
decades since the publication of her first book.
This collection wields the strongest appeal for historians
and anthropologists--especially those engaged in delineating
the historical and cultural intersections of race, gender, and
labor--but its disciplinary breadth is astonishing. History
professor Robin Jarvis Brownlie's comparative analysis of
settler news media in Upper Canada between the 1820s and
1850s and the writings of two Anishinabe preachers, Peter
Jones and George Copway, draws upon elements of historical
and literary analysis to produce a nuanced and interdisciplinary
elaboration of racial discourses on Indianness and whiteness in
Upper Canada. Brownlie's contribution represents just one of
the collection's many essays that illustrate the importance of
interdisciplinarity, scholarly cooperation, and intellectual
curiosity in a manner that this reviewer has rarely seen spelled
out in clearer terms.
Although some pieces are stronger than others, each of the
dozen essays in Finding a Way to the Heart is nonetheless
valuable. The excellent triumvirate of inaugural essays by
Jennifer S. H. Brown, Franca Iacovetta, and Valerie J. Korinek
multitask as both personal reminiscences of Van Kirk's
collegiality and scholarly spirit, and as historical surveys of the
changing landscape of feminist scholarship and its academic
reception in Canada since the 1970s. These essays are
invaluable memoranda to later generations of feminist scholars
of the work that has been accomplished thus far, and what
remains unfinished. Robert Alexander Innes's contribution
challenges the scholarly focus on tribal affiliations as the
primary means of consolidating group identity on the northern
plains. This focus, he argues, ignores the importance of kinship
ties in the formation of group identity. Questioning the notion
advocated by some scholars that tribal boundaries are
"concrete," Innes suggests that group formation on the northern
plains took place instead at the band level. Innes's essay
provides a comprehensive historical review of the problematic
politics of the term tribe since the 1960s and is critical of the
scholarly tendency to distinguish Métis from First Nations
groups, which obfuscates the close relationships that existed
between them despite apparent cultural differences. Innes's
essay is perhaps most valuable for the way it enlarges the
scholarly network of Van Kirk et al.'s influence, forging
implicit connections with the rising focus on kinship criticism
in contemporary Indigenous studies.{87}
The structure and organization of the collection reflect the
field's increasing complexity over the decades. Although the
contributors share a common pool of resources, the
organization and variety of their essays nonetheless gesture
toward an ever-widening field of inquiry and influence, evident
in Katrina Srigley's suggestion that scholars "need to think
differently about source material" in order to continue to
develop "an Indigenous-centred historiography" (243), and in
Brownlie's advocacy of a historical approach that analyzes the
interactions between settlers and First Nations people, rather
than considering their histories in isolation from each other (171).
Readers of this collection should be prepared to look past
some copyediting problems. Although most of these issues are
mercifully minor, they are nevertheless particularly pronounced
in contexts that might hinder scholars seeking to follow up on
sources or to do further reading because many of these errors
appear in the essays' endnotes, and some individuals' names are
spelled inconsistently.
As its title suggests, the collection engages critically with
both Aboriginal and women's history in Canada. Some readers
may find this dual purpose simultaneously discomfiting and
provocative, which may have been the goal of the book after
all. However, this book occasionally risks perpetuating the
elision of the uneasy tensions that exist between Aboriginal
peoples and the more generalized category of "women" in
Canada. This threat is uncomfortably close to the surface of
some of the collection's essays, particularly Kathryn
McPherson's analysis of "domestic intrusion narratives" written
by Euro-Canadian women in the late-nineteenth-century prairie
west and their articulation of a different colonial encounter for
settler women than settler men. The first part of the title of
Patricia A. McCormack's contribution, "'A World We Have
Lost': The Plural Society of Fort Chipewyan," explicitly
invokes the title of the final chapter of Van Kirk's famous first
book. However, like Van Kirk's text, the source material that
would necessitate the use of quotation marks around this
phrase is never mentioned in McCormack's essay. The double
erasure of the phrase's origins and the rhetoric of vanishing that
it perpetuates undermine McCormack's otherwise revisionist
study of pluralist fur trade societies in northern Alberta, which
she establishes in direct contradistinction to a persistent
tendency in historical scholarship to reduce the fur trade world
to binary oppositions. Although the content of McCormack's
article does not reproduce the {88} rhetoric of vanishing,
it is
nonetheless bookended by it: the implications of the title
become manifest in her concluding observation that the plural
society that persisted in Fort Chipewyan well into the twentieth
century is now lost (163). These threats are largely mitigated,
however, in those essays where they loom most ominously by
an emphasis on the fact that prevailing attitudes toward women
or Aboriginal peoples were neither monolithic nor oriented
exclusively around victimization. Rather, these essays suggest
that local attitudes were oriented around agency and activism,
both of which are most pointedly demonstrated in the
collection's final essay that rounds out and punctuates its finer
points, Srigley's astute analysis of the lasting and varied impact
that Indian Status and Bill C-31 had on families.
Notwithstanding these concerns, Finding a Way to the
Heart is nonetheless an extremely valuable resource for
teachers of Aboriginal and women's history in Canada and
abroad. This breadth of scholarship is most evident in the
contributions by Elizabeth Jameson, Angela Wanhalla, and
Victoria Freeman. Jameson discusses Van Kirk's influence on
international feminist scholarship, and her particular resonance
south of the border with historians of American Indians,
western women, and, broadly speaking, the American West.
Although the essays that precede it touch upon Van Kirk's later
work, Wanhalla's discussion of interracial marriage in
Aotearoa/New Zealand's whaling and trading era in the early
nineteenth century and its long-term influence on the identity
of Ngai Tahu is the first in the collection to draw extensively
upon Van Kirk's later historical studies of mixed-raced families
in the Pacific Northwest. Freeman's analysis of attitudes toward
miscegenation between 1860 and 1914 covers a broad
geographical range, including Canada, the United States,
Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand, making it an excellent
complement to the discussions begun by Jameson and
Wanhalla. Although Freeman's analysis was inspired by Van
Kirk's foundational work, her main point of reference is a
provocative 2001 American Historical Review article by
Patrick Wolfe in which he proposed that the timbre of colonial
discourses of miscegenation was contingent upon whether the
colonizer's power over the colonized had its source in land or
labor. Freeman's essay represents an important intervention
into both monolithic notions of attitudes toward miscegenation
and Wolfe's dichotomous construction, which, she suggests,
"considers only the colonizers' discourses and deals only with
those that were dominant," argu-{89}ing instead that such
attitudes were always calibrated at the local level by "alternate
and minority viewpoints . . . with which the ruling elites had to
contend" (196-97).
This collection of essays will also be an excellent resource
for undergraduate and graduate students seeking an enlarged
understanding of the field, from its development to an
overview of its major thinkers and texts to its current state of
affairs and possible future directions.

Readers of this journal will not be surprised that Trickster
Lives! In his many guises! And most will be aware that
American Indians not only excoriate Columbus; they also joke
about him: Vine Deloria Jr., in Custer Died for Your Sins: An
Indian Manifesto. Sherman Alexie chided Stephen Colbert for
housing him in a hotel room with a view of a statue of
Columbus. Carter Revard, in Family Matters, Tribal Affairs
(1998), wrote a hilarious satire, "Report to the Nation:
Repossessing Europe." Special Agent Wazhazhe, #2,230,
concludes: "It may be impossible to civilize the Europeans. . . .
Europe in any event won't be worth things of serious value. So
don't let any of us offer language, traditions, bead work,
religion, or even half of the Cowboy and Indian myth, let alone
ourselves, this time" (76, 89). But few readers may know that
Adam Fortunate Eagle, in 1973, discovered Italy, claiming it in
protest of Columbus Day. He kindly offered a brief audience to
Pope Paul VI, during which Fortunate Eagle blessed him.
As befits stories told by Trickster, the text is (seemingly)
chaotic and disordered. Addressed to various audiences, it is a
whirligig of short stories (comic and tragic), anecdotes,
reminiscences, critiques of federal Indian policies,
paragraph-long jokes, stinging letters to the Indian Health
Service (to which President Obama sympathetically replies,
though I wonder . . .), letters to editors, all of which his
grandchildren call "damn Indian stories." Fortunate Eagle is a
trickster of many facets: social activist, serious joke medicine
person, national treasure, enemy of the state (thanks to the
federal government), living history, to which I {90}
would add
straight talker, loose cannon, humorist (at times, mildly
scatological; no trickster could be anything less). Sitting Bull
has graciously provided a foreword recommending him as "a
Contrary Warrior, in that he joins the ranks of shamans,
skinwalkers, shape shifters, sacred clowns, heyokas,
republicans, and evangelists" (iii). He also warns us that
"[Fortunate Eagle] is a badass Indian who sees another reality,
who dances to the beat of a different drum, who uses satire and
humor to call attention to the inequalities of our society. Or, he
can be a bumbling coyote, who can screw up the best of
intentions, crap on it, kick some dirt over it, and then walk
away with his tail held high. He has the guts to write a book
this bad and thinks he can get away with it, and if he hasn't
offended someone with his stories, he is not doing his job" (xiii).
On first reading and rereads, I kept on
asking myself, "Did
this really happen? Does it matter if it didn't?" But Fortunate
Eagle anticipates such dizzying responses: "Some of my stories
are total fabrications disguised as the truth. . . . Personally, I
find it impossible to distinguish the difference between outright
fabrications and bullshit. You, gentle reader, must decide. But
don't you agree that bullshit is the fertilizer of the mind?" (xv).
So how is the hapless reader ever to decipher his stories?
Fortunately for us (I only discovered this on the fourth
reading), our author has included an "Appendix: Percentage of
Bullshit per Story." So I'm pleased to announce that, according
to his own estimations, this narrative is 2066% bullshit and
4009% true.
Fortunate Eagle was born Adam Nordwall in 1929: his
mother was Red Lake Ojibwa and his father Swedish. After the
father's untimely death, his mother had no recourse but to send
her five sons and their older sister to an Indian Training
Boarding School, about which Fortunate Eagle published a
memoir, Pipestone: My Life in an Indian Boarding School
(2010). They lived there for the next ten years. Later, he met
his Shoshone wife Bobbie at the then Haskell Institute in
Kansas, and they have been married for sixty-five years. "That's
a record of survival few people can ever achieve. Ho Wah!"
(196). He became a community activist in 1962 and helped to
organize the takeovers of Alcatraz in 1964 and 1969. One of
the most moving stories, "Alcatraz Is Not an Island" (95% BS,
5% true) is a haunting tribute to the huge captive turtle Iktomi,
who lives in the sea depths and is perfectly capable of shaking
up the island. "Evil Spirits of Alcatraz" (98% BS, 2% true)
spans centuries of imprisonment and despair, leavened by a
comic ending. "The Saga of the Lahontan Valley {91}
Long-Legged Turtles" (98% BS , 2% true), is an endearing,
compassionate allegory of the slaughter of the Great Plains bison.
Fortunate Eagle became a published writer in his eighties,
although he had been scribbling throughout his storied career.
It took him fifteen years to complete Scalping Columbus. His
English teacher at Haskell, Mae Maeness (is this name real?),
"encouraged my writing by having me read my goofy essays to
the delight of the other students. That literary time bomb
waited over fifty years before exploding into reality"
("Interview with Adam Fortunate Eagle," publisher's press release).
Our good fortune is that he became a writer (he is also a
sculptor and has many other tricks of trades). His life has been
a perilous journey, tinged by sadness (a sister's suicide), serious
illnesses, and danger, as well as full with triumphs and honors.
At one stage, he and his wife bravely went into self-imposed
exile on her Shoshone-Paiute reservation; he was considered
dangerous by the federal government. There is so much more
to say, but I conclude by stating (0% BS, 100% true) that
Fortunate Eagle is indeed a "national treasure." Read his book!

Women and Ledger Art: Four Contemporary Native American
Artists, by Richard Pearce, is an in-depth analysis of four
Native women artists who extend the Plains ledger art tradition
into contemporary times. This is reason enough to make the
book an important addition to any library collection. The artists
are Shannon Ahtone Harjo, Kiowa; Linda Haukaas, Sicangu
Lakota; Dolores Purdy Corcoran, Caddo; and Colleen
Cutschall, Oglala Lakota. Richard Pearce, the non-Native
author, uses extensive interviews with the artists for
biographies as well as discussion of their aesthetics. Forty-six
full-color plates represent the richness of the women's visions.
In a few instances, photographs of cultural referents extend
background context. An example is a 2006 photograph,
Contemporary Turkey Dancers by Dayna Bowker Lee, which
features the hair ornaments, dush-tos, prominent in Purdy
Corcoran's pen-and-ink ledger drawing Turkey Dance. The vast
majority of the book's images are {92} the women's
artwork.
The large dimensions of the book, 8.5 x 10.5 in., add to the
illustrations' impact.
Pearce describes his book's goals as "three-fold": to
celebrate the artists; to place the narrative aspects of the art into
"geo-historical contexts"; and to document the art and the
artists' intentions through in-depth interviews. Each chapter
presents brief biographies, lengthy artists' quotations, detailed
description of selected artworks, and discussion of gender issues.
Pearce discusses the roles of women in relationship to the
ledger art tradition, including discussion of women warriors.
He quotes Bea Medicine's essay "Warrior Women-- Sex Role
Alternatives for Plains Indian Women" on the flexibility of
Plains Indian gender roles, especially for the "Ninawaki," or
"manly woman," who engages in a warrior's activities as a "life
occupation" or for particular occasions. Such women,
according to Medicine, "counted coup, received honors, gained
wealth, and were members of female soldier societies with
specific police duties." Pearce notes the nineteenth-century and
earlier practices of women's roles in battle as "helpers, vocal
supporters, and warriors." The author fully summarizes
available sources about women's historic connections to ledger
art, because in several instances this book's contemporary
women artists face ostracism for war-related artworks. Pearce
emphasizes the dynamic and hybrid nature of ledger art. It is
not a frozen artifact, but rather, as Pearce notes, an evolving form.
Any discussion of ledger art begins with its definition, as
the genre and its nuances are unfamiliar to most people. Pearce
opens with an effective explanation of the pictographic warrior
subject matter, drawn on paper ledger books beginning in the
1850s. This hybrid art form continues a precontact hide
painting tradition. The stylized glyphs, with abstract
semi-circles to represent horse hooves, for example, are part of
a codified system for preserving war accounts and winter count
calendars. Notable nineteenth-century ledgers are mostly from
Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, Southern Cheyenne, Arapaho, and
Kiowa nations. From 1875 to 1878, some Southern Plains
prisoners of war at Fort Marion created ledger art, and these
included one Caddo. The artists in Women and Ledger Art are
members of Caddo, Kiowa, and Lakota nations. Pearce asserts
convincingly that these artworks continue specific and detailed
tribal traditions.
Details of ledger art from four different traditions (Caddo,
Kiowa, {93} and two bands of Lakota) are difficult to
interpret
precisely, and the author makes some missteps. In the drawing
Return from War Dance Haukaas depicts women wearing
first-phase Navajo chief 's blankets. In his interpretation,
Pearce assumes "[t]hey would have belonged to a husband,
father, or other male relative who was a chief." These were not
men relatives' possessions, but rather prized trade goods
obtained from Diné (Navajo) sources. The term chief 's blanket
refers to the Diné pattern. Four Northern Cheyenne ledgers
created by Wild Hog, Porcupine, and other Fort Robinson
breakout survivors depict women wearing such blankets
(Plains Indian). The earliest surviving photograph of a
Cheyenne woman, taken in 1867 by Charles William Carter,
shows her wearing a first-phase Navajo chief 's blanket
(Carter). These were the women's prized accoutrements. In
another instance, the author attributes the term snagging to
Lakota people specifically when he discusses a drawing by
Haukaas with that title. Indian Country Today lists snagging as
one of the top five terms in intertribal, not specifically Lakota,
powwow slang ("Top"). When Pearce uses the artists'
information and direct description, he creates effective
explanations of the pieces. He continuously refers back to
women's perspectives in each explication.
Discussion of the artists begins with a brief description of
the 1920s career of Lois Smoky, one of the original members
of the Kiowa Five art movement. In previously unpublished
material, Pearce describes the discrimination she faced,
including mutilation of her artworks, according to Oscar
Jacobson. This establishes a baseline for Pearce's discussion of
women's relationship to ledger art. This early twentieth-century
woman artist's history segues into Kiowa artist Shannon
Ahtone Harjo's chapter. She studied with Southern Cheyenne
artist Dick West at Bacone, and under his tutelage she chose to
focus on her nation's history. Kiowa Sun Dance required much
research with elders and written sources, she tells Pearce, as the
last Kiowa Sun Dance was 1887. Ahtone Harjo's piece Last
Will and Testament depicts a Kiowa man on a horse, painted on
Confederate ten dollar bills, not ledger paper. This repurposing
of a defeated nation's currency adds elements of irony. Many
army personnel, including George Armstrong Custer, were
veterans of the Civil War. The superimposed Kiowa fighter
carries an army bugle, perhaps a captured trophy according to
Pearce, and wears army pants. The artist adds the time and
place, "Young County, Texas, October 1864." This references
the Elm Creek Raid, where Kiowas captured a child, {94}
Millie Durgan, who became Ahtone Harjo's great-grandmother.
Pearce explains the historic context with thoroughly researched
facts and the artist's comments.
Both the works of Linda Huakaas and Delores Purdy
Corcoran use historic ledger paper. Nineteenth-century ledger
books are still available for purchase at estate sales and antique
stores. These original documents create a palimpsest, where
multiple time frames exist at once. Haukaas's At the Museum
shows men and women war society leaders viewing a historic
Lakota pictographic muslin hung at the top of the drawing, as
though in a museum. The artist explains this drawing to Pearce
as a repatriation of a historic object as well as reclaiming the
narratives of museum displays. Dolores Purdy Corcoran selects
particularly appropriate historic documents in addition to
ledgers, including an 1890 Department of the Interior pension
certificate. Her work and Pearce's presentation of her
comments is one of the most effective.
The book concludes with the acrylic paintings and bronze
sculptures of Colleen Cutschall. Her work is not on ledger
paper or other historic documents, but rather it uses images
derived from the ledger art tradition. Her large, thirty- five feet
long sculpture "Spirit Warriors" (2002) is at the Little Big Horn
/ Greasy Grass Aboriginal Memorial. The outlines of three
warriors on horses-- Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho-- ride
toward the horizon, similar in form to ledger pictographs. The
fourth figure, a woman, hands a Medicine Wheel shield to one
of the men. In her comments, Cutschall tells Pearce that
women, like this figure, supported men in their war
expeditions: "Black Shawl, the wife of Crazy Horse, stood
ready with hot meals, fresh horses, and replenished weaponry."
The artist's participation in this project helped change the focus
of the memorial to commemoration of Indigenous inhabitants
rather than Custer. Pearce celebrates this subversion of the
settler narrative.
Pearce spent six years interviewing, photographing, and
studying ledger art. This innovative project is an important
resource for study of narrative Indigenous forms. It also points
out the dearth of art historians writing about contemporary
Native artists, especially Native respondents. Those few Native
people with PhD degrees in art history who write about Native
artists include Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora), Heather Igloliorte
(Inuit), Lara Evans (Cherokee), Jennifer Vigil (Diné), and
perhaps a few more. Another handful of Native people writing
about Native artists who have advanced degrees or community
experience {95} include Arthur Amiotte, Gail Tremblay,
Joseph Horse Capture Jr., Mique'l Askren, Emil Her Many
Horses, Heid Erdrich, Becca Gerken, and Dylan A. T. Miner.
Indigenous American art includes many kinds of historic
artifacts with explicit and implicit narratives, as well as the
works of numerous practicing Indigenous artists. Plains ledger
art falls into the English language category of "visual art." This
does not diminish its importance as a literary text produced by
Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Women and Ledger Art
expands the boundaries of contemporary "literature" in
important ways.

Timothy C. Winegard. For King and Kanata: Canadian
Indians and the First World War. Winnipeg: University of
Manitoba Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-88755-728-6. 224pp.Alicia Robinet, Western
University

Timothy C. Winegard's careful attention to the neglected
history of Canadian Aboriginals during the First World War
makes For King and Kanata: Canadian Indians and the First
World War a significant contribution to First World War,
Aboriginal, and Canadian studies. Despite the incompleteness
of records on Aboriginal participation in the war, Winegard
draws upon an abundance of primary documents--from both
Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal sources--to provide a clear
history of Aboriginal activity in the book's introduction, nine
chapters, and short conclusion. The brief epilogue glosses
Aboriginal participation in the Second World War, as well as
some commemorative efforts to recognize Aboriginal
involvement in both world wars, and the current figures of
Indigenous participation in the American and Canadian
military. Winegard's nuanced balance between individual
anecdotes, secondary sources, and archival records also offers
readers insight into the untold stories of individual Aboriginal
soldiers whose sacrifices are largely unknown.{96}
Winegard's historiography privileges accuracy over political
correctness, which entails that his language often evokes the
context of the time period, a decision that some readers may
find controversial. Winegard avoids charging the Canadian
government with racism, whereas scholars like James Dempsey
have argued that some recruitment efforts in the later years of
the war represented racial prejudice. Winegard suggests,
instead, that these efforts stemmed from the exigencies of the
Canadian militia at the time. Some reviewers have challenged
this book's early chapters for their plodding backstory of
Aboriginals in Canada or Winegard's efforts to justify his
terminology. However, he skillfully summarizes a vast amount
of history, including early contact, the Indian Act, the
residential school system, and the Red River Rebellion to
provide the necessary contexts for both new and seasoned
scholars of not only the First World War, but also Aboriginal
or Canadian studies in general.
Winegard clarifies that there was not in fact an official
policy of exclusion during the war, in contrast to what some
scholars have suggested. He acknowledges the influence of
policies on Aboriginal participation in previous wars--such as
the Boer War--in shaping the unofficial policy of exclusion
from 1914 and into 1915, but also the increased efforts of some
Canadians to initiate all-Aboriginal units (all of which were
rejected). By illuminating statistical indexes, he highlights, for
example, that there were approximately equal numbers of
Aboriginal soldiers from Canada as Euro-Canadian soldiers.
Further, Winegard attends to the differences between tribes in
Canada that may have affected recruitment patterns, which
reminds us that we should not consider Aboriginal groups as
homogeneous during the war.
Winegard explores Aboriginal participation in the context
of contemporaneous race theories that perceived Aboriginals as
possessing innate military prowess. Citing evidence for the
prevalent "noble savage" construct and the assimilatory
practices of Canada's Department of Indian Affairs (DIA), this
book highlights additional ways of understanding the varying
perceptions of Aboriginal participation. Moving beyond the
"noble savage" stereotype and instead surveying records of
Aboriginal service, Winegard concludes that Aboriginal
soldiers "were exceptional marksmen" (114) in the First World
War because of their hunting and trapping abilities. Whereas
previous scholars have ignored the imperial documents of
October 1915 that led to official inclusion of Aboriginals in the
Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF), Winegard engages with
{97} these imperial archives to highlight their importance
in
the policy shift to military inclusion of Aboriginal men.
Although Aboriginals were officially allowed into the CEF in
December 1915, other minorities in Canada, such as blacks and
Asians, were still unofficially restricted from joining the CEF, a
distinction that Winegard argues exemplifies the continued
belief in the enhanced martial prowess of Aboriginals.
Engaging with early war policy also enables him to
demonstrate the shift in policy toward other minority soldiers
and to show how the recruitment of black Canadian soldiers
was connected to the acceptance of Aboriginals into the CEF.
He points to the unfortunately scarce availability of
documentation when attempting to consider the full extent of
Aboriginal participation in the war. He highlights that an
unknown number of American Indigenous soldiers also fought
in Canadian regiments prior to the declaration of war by the
United States in 1917.
Importantly, this book prompts readers to consider the
military structure of the imperial government when considering
Canada's wartime decisions and Aboriginal participation in the
First World War. In addition to treaty agreements with the
Crown, as Winegard reminds us, Aboriginals did not possess
Canadian citizenship rights during the war, and thus many
Aboriginals felt more allegiance to the Crown than to Canada.
Winegard's attention to the complex triangulations of Empire
nuances the colonial relations within Canada; he reasons that
Aboriginals fought in the First World War partly because they
sought autonomy from Canada just as Canada looked for the
same from Britain. Moreover, he points out that Aboriginals
did not own their reserves or their band funds, which affected
their ability, rather than their desire, to contribute to the war
effort. He also highlights that this ownership vested in the
Crown meant that the government continued to appropriate
Aboriginal lands even into the postwar years.
Winegard cites some instances of Aboriginal resistance to
recruitment as "evidence of the strategies initiated by Indians to
promote their agendas and to confront the paternalistic edicts
of the Indian Act and the control of the DIA" (66).
Some
Aboriginals, and even entire reserves, resisted compliance with
conscription efforts; For King and Kanata reveals that it was
not only French-Canadians who actively resisted government
attempts to conscript them leading up to the Military Service
Act of 1917. Winegard provides evidence of one soldier at the
front who sought clarification about his rights to return home
based on laws {98} passed during the war. Winegard
does well
to point to Aboriginal sovereignty efforts during the War, for
Aboriginals conceived of their support of the imperial
government as means by which to lobby the Crown to
encourage Canada to revise unjust laws. Whereas much
Canadian historiography of the First World War highlights the
increased autonomy of the Canadian nation as a result of the
war, this book provides ample evidence to suggest that
Aboriginal groups were politically active and lobbied their own
interests both during and after the war.
Toward the book's conclusion in the chapter "On the Home
Front," Winegard moves beyond the traditional masculinist
perspective and explores the ways in which Aboriginal women
participated in the war effort. Here he could have pushed his
analysis to investigate further the gender dynamics between
male and female Aboriginals and other Canadians during the
war. However, in expanding our knowledge on Aboriginal
participation in the war, Winegard does not ignore details of
white Canada's war service, which makes his monograph a
highly informative introduction to those studying Canada's role
in the First World War more generally. In this vein, this book
treats Aboriginal participation as a fundamental aspect of the
historical narrative of Canada's participation in the war, rather
than as a supplement to white Canada's involvement.
Winegard's book is a well-researched and ultimately engaging
survey of Aboriginal participation in the First World War that
will interest scholars, students, and the general reader of
Canadian history, Aboriginal studies, or histories of the First
World War.

{99}

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

PETER L. BAYERS is an English professor and director of
American studies at Fairfield University in Fairfield CT. In
addition to publishing scholarship on mountaineering (Imperial
Ascent, UP of Colorado) and in Western American studies
(WAL, Rocky Mountain Review), he
has published a number of
articles in Native studies (SAIL and MELUS). When not teaching
and writing he devotes time to his family, heads to the
mountains to climb, and works with Simply Smiles, a service
organization, in partnership with the community of La Plant on
the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Reservation to help develop a
bright future for Lakota families and their children.

COLLEEN G. EILS is a PhD candidate in the Department of
English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is interested
in contemporary Native, Mexican American, and Asian
American fiction.

SUSAN GARDNER is faculty emerita at UNC Charlotte, and
continues to teach American Indian literature courses part-time
in the English Department and the American Studies Program.
This bio is 0% BS and 100% true.

MICHAEL GREYEYES (Plains Cree) is a choreographer,
director,
and educator. Selected directing credits include A Soldier's
Tale, Nôhkom, from thine eyes (Signal Theatre),
Pimooteewin
(Soundstreams Canada), Almighty Voice and his Wife (Native
Earth Performing Arts), The River (Nakai Theatre), Seven
Seconds (2010 imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival).
In 2010 he founded Signal Theatre, an Indigenous theatre
company engaging in practice-based research. Signal is
interdisciplinary and intercultural and has presented at
Toronto's Harbourfront Centre, the Banff Centre, and the
National Arts Centre of Canada. He is an {100} associate
professor at York University and current Graduate Program
director of the MFA stream.

JENNA HUNNEF is a doctoral candidate in the Department
of
English at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation examines
the ideological role of outlaws and extra-legal practices in the
legal, aesthetic, and gendered production of domesticated
spaces and bodies in the United States, particularly in late
nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Indian
Territory/Oklahoma, through literary analyses of the True Grit
novel and film franchise, the dramatic work of R. Lynn Riggs,
and narratives of the lives of Belle Starr and Ned Christie.

DREW LOPENZINA is professor of early American and
Native
American literature at Old Dominion University in Norfolk,
Virginia. His book Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up the
Pen in the Colonial Period (SUNY Press 2012) offers a
rethinking of Indigenous engagements with colonial literacy,
detailing how Native communities drew from their own
narrative and literary traditions as they forged interactions with
Western print discourse. He has published in the journals
American Literature, American Quarterly, American Indian
Quarterly and others. Currently he is working on a cultural
biography of the nineteenth-century Pequot activist and
minister William Apess.

DENISE LOW is the author of online and journal articles
about
Cheyenne ledger art and is director of four Plains Indian
Ledger Art (University of California, San Diego) ledgers by
Northern Cheyenne men including Wild Hog and Porcupine
during their 1878 incarceration in Dodge City. She has British
Isles and Delaware ancestry. She is grateful to Jaune Quick To
See Smith for her suggestions regarding Native art historians.

ALICIA ROBINET is a PhD candidate in the Department of
English and Writing at Western University and an instructor at
King's University College at Western University. Her research
interests include Canadian war literature and postcolonial
literature.

KENNETH ROEMER is an adviser for the Native American
Student Association at the University of Texas at Arlington,
where he is a Piper Professor and Distinguished Teaching and
Scholar Professor. He is a founding {101} member of
ASAIL,
the coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Native American
Literature, and editor of Approaches to Teaching Momaday's
The Way to Rainy Mountain and Native American Writers of
the United States. His articles and essay reviews on Native
literatures have appeared in American Literature, American
Quarterly, American Literary History, and SAIL. He is the
author or editor of four books on utopian literature and one
personal narrative, A Sidewalker's Japan.

CARRIE LOUISE SHEFFIELD is a senior lecturer in the
English
Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is
also a co-adviser to the University's Native American Student
Association and American Indians in Science and Engineering
Society. Her research interests include contemporary Native
American literature, intersections between Native American
and non-Native popular culture, and trauma and healing in
Native American literature.